The perambulatory boundary clause form entered the English imaginary as a tool of colonization, when the West Saxons began writing charters that claimed British land using the textual forms of the Celtic British people. This relationally oriented landscape description—“from Ida’s creek to the long ridge, and from the long ridge to the wolf pit”—became standard in early medieval English land charters. The landmarks are not in themselves unique, but together, when “walked” by the reader or literally perambulated, combine to produce a unique spatial and legal entity. They were also in flux; over time, landmarks like “Ida’s creek” would have shifted and changed, requiring local, lived experience to navigate the physical, social, and chronological features of the described landscape. As a result, a form designed to stabilize legal boundaries also became a textual and epistemological model for navigating unstable relational identity in the centuries of English literature that followed. Understanding the development of this form in the Old English boundary clauses allows us to see how and why it is operating in Old English literature.