The toft as the homestead — the specific piece of ground on which a house stands and has stood — carries in its etymology the entire history of settlement, the human claim to a particular patch of earth expressed in a single compact word; A poet might write "the toft held the memory of the house long after the house itself had gone — the ground plan still legible in the grass, the slight elevation of the site preserving the shape of habitation against the leveling tendency of time"; In medieval land records, "toft and croft" names the standard smallholder's holding — the house plot and its field — and this legal formula appears in verse about the archaeology of the English countryside as a reminder that every village has its documentary history; Tennyson's elegies attend to the persistence of the past in the landscape — the toft where a house once stood, the old garden grown over, the physical evidence of lives lived and ended that remains in the topography long after the people have gone; In poems about the Scottish Highlands after the Clearances, the toft becomes an image of what was destroyed — the homestead site, the cultivation ridges of the lazy beds, the physical evidence of communities evicted to make way for sheep; The toft's combination of domestic intimacy (the house site, the family's specific place) and historical depth (the site that may have been inhabited for centuries) makes it a word for poems that want to hold the personal and the historical in the same image.