New Maps of Ulster

Northern Ireland Without History ...

2012-02-07T17:50:00.006Z

... is hard to imagine. But Google Maps, for a while at least, can help us imagine such a thing. Google Maps' aerial photographs lag behind the true development of Belfast. In this image it seems that the public record office is nothing but brownfield, utterly vacant.

Fig1.

Fig2, zoomed in a little.

In reality, of course, a shiny new edifice now stands here, the new Public Record Office of Northern Ireland is open for visitors and researchers. But on Google Maps the site is empty. As if Northern Ireland has decided against keeping records and wiped the slate clean.

Watching the Border

2012-01-12T17:11:00.015Z

The French Geographic Journal EchoGéo has just published a paper where I discuss my map, The map of Watchful Architecture 1.0. The paper is online at this link. It is illustrated and in English. Apart from details from my own map the paper is also illustrated by this Crown Copyright map, below. It shows Division H, the area under the supervision of Brigadier Peter Morton when he was sent to head up 3rd Para in South Armagh during the Troubles. Dealing with the border was a major part of his duties. The border along Division H was not so long, most of it within view of Slieve Gullion, a peak 273 metres tall. Yet it had 43 cross-border routes.

Click on the map for a closer look.

The perforated border was a security problem for Morton's troops. It was a convenient escape route for attackers. It was not well marked, leading to the occasional southern straying of the troops themselves, causing diplomatic incidents with the government of the Irish Republic.

During those years many political figures were calling for the complete sealing of the border with a fence or wall that would then be patrolled and defended. Morton, who daily felt the effects of the open border, nonetheless rejected such ideas. In his memoir of his time in South Armagh he remarks that such a construction would have been "against democracy." This makes best sense in the context of the time. Winston Churchill's use of Iron Curtain metaphor was still reverberating across Europe. The closed border to the east and Berlin’s division were powerful political symbols. The government of the United Kingdom was not going to build anything comparable to that Soviet instrument.

In 1976, shortly before Morton’s deployment to Northern Ireland, Margaret Thatcher made a speech to the Finchley Conservatives. It was to become a well-known speech as it was when the soon-to-be prime minister embraced the term Iron Lady. Who better to do battle with an Iron Curtain? In the speech she said “Socialism is the denial of choice, the denial of choice for ordinary people in their everyday lives … Socialists don't trust the people. Churchill did. We do.”

The border area between Armagh and Louth. A detail from The Map of Watchful Architecture 1.0. Other views of the map illustrate the full paper at EchoGéo.

The military operation in Northern Ireland during the Troubles never did involve a large-scale sealing of the border. However, especially in South Armagh, many towers and checkpoints were built to guard over the area. We trusted people, but some people needed watching.

Fracking on the Border

2011-12-05T14:33:00.010Z

The map below displays the area of Co. Fermanagh marked for Fracking, an extremely controversial method of extracting gases from under the ground. Two companies have been granted exploration licenses for this area but the issue is now coming under fresh examination.

Click on the map for a closer look.

In the Fracking process boreholes are made into shale rock. This is a common rock-form in north-western Ireland, what geologists call a Carboniferous Basin unites counties Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan, Donegal and Fermanagh. Water and chemicals are forced down into natural fractures in the rock, opening them and allowing the gas to be extracted. One risk is that of the chemical cocktail seeping into ground water and endangering health. There are others concerns, such as the possibility that Fracking contributes to earth tremors. Fracking companies themselves admit that this is a very young technology and all its side-effects are not yet fully understood. Tomorrow (December 6th) a motion calling for a moratorium on Fracking in Northern Ireland will be under debate in Parliament buildings, Belfast. A group calling themselves 'No Fracking Way' will be outside Stormont seeking to highlight the environmental dangers of the process.

Protest is loud south of the border too and, as Andy Pollack observed on Slugger O’Toole lately, the fight against Fracking is starting to turn into a cross-border campaign.

A cartographic statement by Brigitta Varadi and John the Map. I lifted at this image from the profile of Stephen Rennicks, an artist who lives in the area and who is a part of the Engage Collective.

Here’s one particularly vibrant and sturdy piece of awareness-raising happening south of the border. 'Talk About Fracking' is an exhibition and website by the Engage Artist Collective The exhibition is running for a few more days at Mercantile Plaza in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim. The map above features in the exhibition. It shows possible Fracking drilling paths in Glenfarne area, south of Lough MacNean. Creation of the map was a collaboration between Brigitta Varadi and someone called John the Map. John the Map sounds like someone I would like to meet.

Grey skies of Co. Down

2011-11-30T14:27:00.002Z

I recently spent time in the Ulster Hospital, on the edge of Belfast. Hung in one corridor is canvas from 1971 by Colin Middleton, Co. Down. It is a landscape. Semi-abstracted shapes in the foreground evoked the granite base of the county, small allotments of hard ground. Dark mountainous shapes in the back succeed, I think, in evoking the Mountains of Mourne. Perhaps this evocation is even better made by the negative space hovering between the mountains. The wide valley filled with grey sky and cloud.

Sorry about the reflections, it was hard to find a good angle to photograph this painting.

Outside the Ulster Hospital.

There is something recognisable in the steep profiles of the mountains as painted by Middleton. Also, the grey shade of the sky feels utterly exact. Stepping outside the main entrance to the Ulster Hospital I'm greeted by a slab of Down stratus. Its grey a good match for Middleton's.

Poor Law Unions

2011-10-16T00:17:00.014+01:00

I found this map in the collection of the New York Public Library. It is from 1922 and shows “the Province of Ulster with the six North East Counties shaded according to Population in favour of the Free State, and in favour of the Belfast Parliament determined by Poor Law Unions.”

Overview. Click on this and other images for a closer look.

Lower right.

Some time after the original printing, thick cross-hatching has been added to the map to represent polling information. This crude over-drawing is unfortunate because what lies beneath is perhaps the most interesting thing about this map. Here the country is not subdivided into parishes, baronies or townlands, but a whole other category; Poor Law Unions. These demarcations were used to organise relief for the poorest members of society and were established under the Poor Relief Act of 1838. Similar units were created all across the British Isles at the time. Poor Law Unions tended to be drawn-up so as to have a market town at their centre. So they often crossed county boundaries and any other kind of boundary that might have already been in situ. Selection of the town that was to be hub of a Poor Law Union was often of local importance as it would, ironically perhaps, bring jobs. The first employment being the building of a workhouse.

By the middle of the 19th century there were 163 Poor Law Unions in Ireland. Elsewhere in the British Isles poverty-stricken people had the right to claim relief from their Poor Law Union but in Ireland it was never enshrined as a right. It was considered to be aid.

Donegal’s Inishowen had Poor Law electoral divisions rather charmingly named “Lilies” and “Three Trees.”

Historian Raymond Gillespie tells us that the “Irish Poor Law system was the quintessential product of the Victorian enthusiasm for administrative reform in Ireland.” Eventually the system of Poor Law Unions evolved from a basic safety net for the poor towards something like an early public health service. In the freshly formed Irish Free State the Poor Law system was abolished in 1925, only a few years after this map was drawn over. In Northern Ireland the Poor Law operated until the National Health Service was established in 1946.

But what of the voting? Voting is the overt subject of the map, at some point somebody drew over the Poor Law Unions in the six counties of Northern Ireland to discuss voting patterns.

Key the to voting.

When Poor Law Unions were operating they were further divided into electoral divisions. By the middle of the 19th century there were 3,438 of these and the northern units are displayed on this map. Voting was used to elect the local Guardians, members of the Union boards. In the title 'Guardian' I think I can detect the Victorian enthusiasm that Gillespie referrers to.

With this map it appears that Poor Law Union’s electoral divisions were used for something else. Not just to deicide on the local guardians but to express a view on the future of Northern Ireland. Maintain union with Britain or go in with the Irish Free State. “[T]he six North East Counties shaded according to Population in favour of the Free State, and in favour of the Belfast Parliament.” When, why and by whom this information was gathered is a mystery to me. The map is hand-shaded, but by who? Were the results of this poll on the future of Northern Ireland taken as an official measure? One to tend to hope not, only property owners could vote on Poor Law Union business and the more property you owned the more votes you got. Then again, modern democracy is not necessarily a form of democracy that would be recognised by someone in the grip of a Victorian enthusiasm.

Much of the historic information for the above came from ‘Poor Law Unions and their Records.’ An essay by Dr. Raymond Gillespie. You can read it at this link.

Monster of Ards

2011-09-09T12:56:00.011+01:00

Here’s a map I found on the internet. It probably passed through several websites and I can find no reference for it. Style and content-wise it could be from anywhere between 1650 and 1750. The sea monster is a medieval throw back. You don’t see to many Irish maps of the ‘Here Be Monsters’ sort. Ireland was not getting mapped much when monsters were populating cartography. Monks of Early Christian Ireland were writing down stories and lore, drawing monsters in the margins of those texts, not making maps.

The text in the lower left indicate the map was produced in Holland.

Perhaps calling it a monster is a bit harsh, it seems harmless enough. Could it be based on a whale? Whales are still regularly sighted in the channel between here and Scotland.

West Country Horror

2011-08-05T15:54:00.005+01:00

Here’s a map produced by Francis Jobson in the late 16th century. It recalls a transitional time between Ulster's condition as volatile and dangerous to outsiders and an Ulster that was claimed and well-mapped. It is quite obvious which parts of Ulster were coming under Crown control and which were not. The east is detailed and reasonably accurate. The west is wild and barren of detail. While making this map Jobson observed that Ulster was populated by “a most savage and rebellious people from whose cruelty God only by his divine power delivered me being every hour in danger to lose my head”. This was probably no exaggeration. Richard Barlett, another Elizabethan cartographer (who’s work I have written about here and here), did indeed have his head chopped off by some locals when attempting to map Donegal.

Click through for a closer look.

In movies and books we have the genre of horror, stories and images that use our deepest fears to evoke strong emotional reactions. This map looks like horror cartography. The unknown west seems freakishly bloated and mutated, like some kind of monstrous boil. And just as monsters get bigger in the telling this vision of the west looms large, overwhelming the rest of the province. Lots of huge and nameless mountains that, in reality, were no bigger than the Mountains of Mourne in the east. I find it almost upsetting to see Donegal so swollen and strange alongside a reasonably measured east. I think this map would have chilled the blood of those viewing it at the time it was drawn as well. Invoke a horror of what lay west of the Bann.

The original audience did not know what western Ulster really looked like. They had no idea this representation was falsely bloated and contorted. Nonetheless, his map could have promoted nightmares because of those high mountains, imagine the fog and the isolation! Because of those empty plains. Few roads, few rivers, few place names. This lack of information would have signified worrying things; no knowledge, no control, no civilization. Anything could be happening there among the savage and the uncharted. The only limits to the possible horror were the limits of your own imagination.

Photo Map of Belfast

2011-07-05T20:36:00.009+01:00

You can currently find around Belfast a small square leaflet merging cartography and photography. Exploring Belfast in Photographs encourages the visitor or resident to find their way around with an eye on history, via oldish and historic photos in the leaflet. The map features only a limited number of sites, it has the feel of a pilot publication. Personally, I’d like to see it expanded because it is a good idea. To both a visitor and a local it might add a layer to the actual topography they see on the street, adding some time-travel exploration to a walk through town.

Section of the map, click through for a closer look.

Photo corresponding to number 2.

The above photo was taken by Bill Kirk in the early 80s. It is of a security gate that used to be at the bottom of Royal Avenue, designed to prevent bombs from being placed in the city centre. Looking at the filtering signs above it appears this gate was only for women, could that really have been the case? Perhaps men used the opposite pavement.

The prospect of being searched every time you went to the city centre must have helped keep many people in their outer neighbourhoods. Such a grim feature would deaden any city centre and Belfast’s has not recovered yet. However, being subjected to such mechanisms may not feel as remote to us as it may have recently. The text points out that “with the increasing security at airports over the last decade, it is easier to imagine the adjustments required to live a normal life under the extraordinary conditions necessitated by terrorism.”

Visible Divisions

2011-06-10T16:38:00.014+01:00

Lately I found this map in a Belfast second-hand shop. Unfolding it gave me the trill of discovery, although I know its secrets are open ones. Around its rim the map is marked “restricted” and “UK officials are not to release this map outside UK government service.” Yet there it was, a curiosity on sale for four pounds. It is of south Co. Down.

Overview. The map has a thin plastic coating which gives it the shine.

Detail 2.

The map was published in 1978. It shows, apart from the usual roads, mountains, rivers and towns, the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s own divisions and their two-letter handlers. So for example, the town of Castlewellan in the RUC’s division ‘Castlewellan,’ with the call sign FT. The map shows and labels all these areas in south Co. Down.

Detail 3.

Detail 4.

The marks in red are the sensitive information. This was over-printed onto an Ordnance Survey map. This is neatly symbolic of the way the Ordnance Survey is closely bonded not with only land-management and ownership but with starker means of state control, the police and the military.

Of course the clue is in the name, ordnance means weaponry. It is no secret that defensive concerns were behind the drive to map the British Isles from the very beginning. In her book Map of a Nation Rachel Hewitt tells us that a department known as the Office of Ordnance had existed in Britain since the 14th Century and began as an adjunct to the Royal Arsenal. It was from here that today’s Ordnance Survey would slowly evolve, mainly under the direction of military engineers. I note that the map I bought in the second-hand shop had its policing demarcations added by the army’s 42 Survey Engineer Regiment.

Detail 5.

A major project in the Survey’s early history was the mapping of Scotland, part of the attempt to bring the highlands under control after several Jacobite risings. It was completed in 1752, having mapped 15,000 square miles of mountains, lochs, forests and glens. It was a formative, youthful, experience in map-making and the resulting maps were not highly accurate. One of its creators conceded that this map of Scotland might be better considered a “magnificent military sketch.”

Scotland got special attention as it was a source of trouble. This is another abiding theme in the history of the Ordnance Survey. Its closest attentions were not bestowed on calm, peaceable areas. No, mapping was a means of control as such and it was the untamed places that were attended to. This often meant Ireland, causing Lord Salisbury, in 1883, to quip, “The most disagreeable part of the three kingdoms is Ireland, and therefore Ireland has a splendid map.”

In his book Maps and their Makers G.R. Crone, informs us that the scale used in the 19th century’s Ordnance Survey of Ireland was chosen as it was the most suitable for the movement of infantry. From J.H. Andrews we learn that during the Second World War the British authorities produced Irish maps to scales never made available in locally, in Ireland itself. In 1987, while walking in Northern Ireland, Colm Tóibín met a solider on patrol …

He showed me his map, making sure that none of his comrades could see what he was doing. The map was incredibly detailed, every house, every field, every road carefully denoted and described. It would be impossible to go wrong with such a map.

I doubt the map I found in the second-hand shop would have been used in the field like that. I imagine it was pinned up on the wall of an RUC station or an army barracks, perhaps as an aid to radio communications where those two-letter bigrams would be most useful. Some people living in Co. Down might be surprised to discover that they have had, all the time, an alternative address, superimposed on the map they know. They did not just live in Dundrum, Annalong or the like, but FM, FJ, GB, JZ, JX …

Ireland, 1918

2011-05-11T18:29:00.011+01:00

I found this 1918 election map of Ireland in the New York Public Library. During the 20th Century support for every form of Irish nationalism came from New York making this map a fascinating relic. It was published by the Friends of Irish Freedom in their Manhattan base. 1918’s General Election had seen the overwhelming defeat of the moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party and a huge victory for Sinn Féin. The map distinguishes between these two branches of nationalism although it emphasises the general trend make strong points. Such as, “Of every 5 voters 4 voted for Self-Determination.”

Political Ulster after the 1918 election (click through for a closer look).

Ulster’s border is printed in bold (the only of Ireland’s provinces to be treated like so). This is lest we forget that Ulster is a fact a bigger entity that some of regions that were being proposed for partition at the time. Text on the map reads, “Ulster is the portion above the heavy line. Note the large Republican territory.”

Territory, yes. However Unionists had still won the majority of the 1918 vote across the full nine counties of Ulster. Here the map-makers were hoping to counteract votes with simple size.

Detail, text (click through for a closer look).

Detail, text (click through for a closer look).

Some interesting side-issues are raised on the map’s texts, issues that must have been significant at the time but may no longer seem so. The map wants us to know that Ulster is not the richest province, showing Leinster to have greater production. How that would have played into contemporary debate I am not sure. The map also draws in concerns about Eastern Europe, stating; “God irrevocably fixed the boundaries of Ireland. Those of Poland, Czecho-Slavia, Jugo-Slavia, Serbia, Roumaia, etc, have been fixed temporarily by politicians.”

The map-makers seem to intuit future problems in Eastern Europe. What they may not have predicted was that the smooth green colouring that they spread across most of the Irish counties would soon be ruptured by the Irish Civil War. Most strikingly, partition would create a separate Northern Ireland. The clean, direct, argument of this map would soon become murky.

Peace Bridge

2011-04-05T19:01:00.006+01:00

It is emblematic of division in Northern Irish society that an urban area the size of Londonderry should have only one bridge linking the city over its river. If an absence can be symbolic then the under-adorned Foyle says as much as Belfast’s Peace Walls. That will soon change. A new link has been created. Already some hardhat-wearing construction worker will have been the first to walk across the new bridge, perhaps they drew straws for the honour. The bridge aims to be emblematic of a new era, it has been named the Peace Bridge.

From a new map of Derry City.

Currently still displayed on Goggle Maps, the Peace Bridge early in its construction.

Above is a section from a new visitor map available in Derry. It’s done in a pictorial style, perhaps prettifying the city a tad more than the reality on the ground. The Peace Bridge is not open to use yet but has been included on the map. As far as I know this is the first appearance of the Peace Bridge in Ulster cartography. The bridge is just about as curvy as in this illustration. Swinging back and forth as it crosses the water, making you think of the letter S. If, as has often been the case, dividing a city is done with high straight walls, rigid verticals and right angles then it is pleasingly suitable that both the bridge and this image are all about curves, waves and fanning supports.

Two Towers

2011-03-31T10:05:00.003+01:00

Might any reader know the history of these structures? They are two lighthouses, standing where Carlingford Lough narrows inland. They look nothing like most lighthouses around the Irish coast. They are in the style of Early Christian refuge towers although must be of more resent vintage than that. The tower on shore, just inside Co. Louth, is taller than the one standing in the water. If out on the water you can align the two towers so that the taller looks over the top of its shorter partner.

I took this photo while canoeing in Carlingford Lough lately.

The lighthouses are marked in the upper left hand corner, just above Quanns Bridge.

Presumably, a sailor coming up Carlingford Lough at night aligns the lights vertically and stays on a trajectory that keeps them that way. In this manner the sailor is brought directly to the mouth of the channel to Newry, or kept away from rocks. The solar panels fitted to the sides seem to indicate that the towers perform this function still. But when were they built I wonder?

Ireland on the Spot

2011-02-24T17:09:00.013Z

Looking at maps of Ireland in the collection of the New York Public Library, I notice that, whatever the year, a lot of them were published in the third week of March. This was because St Patrick’s Day was close and people’s interest in Ireland was piqued.

Overview

On 19 March 1941 the Sunday News published a map of “embattled Ireland.” They called it Ireland on the Spot.

… having only recently gained independence after more than seven centuries of struggle, [Ireland] is swept to the torture wrack again by the tide of events. She’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t aid England against Germany. As key to England’s back-door defence Ireland faces invasion in either event.

Along with current events those centuries of struggle get in on this map too. Rather like my own Map of Watchful Architecture, the map-maker here includes a few ancient sites with the contemporary, battle sites such as Blackwater Town (1598) and Newtownbutler (1698).

Air raid warning for Belfast

Some attacks on southern sites

This feature is a minefield across the north of Donegal. Its entire length is off the coast of the supposedly neutral Ireland.

It is the landscape of the war with Germany that make-up the major elements of this map. The graphic of a Swastika-baring airplane warns us that Belfast is only two hours and ten minutes from Nazi bases in Norway. Almost a thousand people would soon die and many more would be injured an attack on Belfast. Outside London, this was the greatest loss of life in a night raid during the Second World War. However when this map was published that raid against Belfast was still one month away. What had occurred at this stage were attacks on the Free State, more than I had realised. The fiery “Bombed by Nazis” label is to be seen around Dublin and in the counties of Carlow, Kildare, Wexford and Meath. In the case of Meath they are to be found just south of a label marking the site of the Battle of the Boyne (1690).

Special Strategic Map

2011-02-08T19:05:00.010Z

I have temporarily relocated to New York City and have been examining some of the map collection in the New York Public Library. A few will appear on this blog during the oncoming weeks.

The top section of the map, click through for a closer look.

The particular map for today was produced by the U.S. Military in 1943. It is called “Ireland (Eire) & Northern Ireland - Special Strategic Map.” It was “for use by War and Navy Department Agencies only. Not for sale or distribution.”

It is disappointing that, upon examination, the map is not that special at all. Despite the hush, hush it focuses on generally available information, transportation links mainly. Concerns that stand-out as perhaps specific to this map are sheer amount of coastal features, islands and inlets, that are named and the oddly blunt attention given to mountains. Mountains are banded together in a style that also flattens their tops. This might be suitable for the Glens of Antrim but is not near accurate elsewhere. This illustrative style is not so different from how mountains were described on maps 200 years previously. Maybe the aim was not to describe the specifics of the mountains but rather just give an indication of whether a certain part of the country was mountainous or not so mountainous. They probably had more accurate maps for closer scales.

Detail.

It should not be surprising that during the Second World War maps of Ireland were produced by the U.S. Army. In early 1942 an Infantry Regiment of the 34th Infantry Division was the first American unit sent to Europe. They arrived in Belfast. These units were designated as U.S. Army Northern Ireland Forces. They trained in the boglands and even patrolled the border.

Ulster Canals

2011-01-09T12:08:00.006Z

Back in August 2008 I wrote about walking along the abandoned Ulster Canal where it constitutes the border between northern and southern Ireland. Some day I might need a boat to repeat the journey. This canal was abandoned in 1931 but now there is increasing interest, both north and south, in re-opening the waterway. If the aspiration of this Belfast City Council map comes true, you will be able to boat from Coleraine to Waterford.

Map taken from Belfast City Council’s Lagan Gateway report, published lately.

But the Lagan Canal will be first to get attention. This canal is actually a set of canals creating a straighter and traversable route along side the meandering Lagan. This infrastructure was also called the Lagan Navigation and it was created in the 18th Century. Records show that in 1838 about 45,000 tonnes of coal, tiles, flour, wheat, manure and turf came to Belfast this way. The rise of motorised transportation eventually brought an end to this form of haulage. The canal was closed in 1956. It is perhaps not so much ironic as grimly logical that the M1 motorway now covers a stretch of the original Lagan Canal. However some of the basic infrastructure of the canal remains in other sections, waiting. A 2006 reported highlighted many possible benefits of refurbishment and now Belfast City Council plans that around 17 kilometres of the Lagan Navigation, from Belfast to Lisburn, be reopened. Hopefully that will just be the beginning.

The Lagan Canal once upon a time.

There’s information about the project on Belfast City Council’s site.

Belfast Facilities

2011-01-02T13:09:00.004Z

Lately I partook in a C.R.O.W. walk through the centre of Belfast. The name stands of City Wight Of Way and the project aims to bring some insights into ignored or unseen parts of Belfast. On the day I joined them we did a walking tour of Belfast public toilets, examining the facilities.

Beginning with St Anne’s Cathedral and ending at Shaftsbury Square.

A tour of toilets may seem an odd way to spend an afternoon but, in the end, it was a surprisingly interesting and even refreshing way of looking at the city. It brought us all places we had never been before. For example, some of our party had never previously entered St Anne’s Cathedral. Spend a consistent few hours comparing toilets, or perhaps any other thing, and a sense of mild connoisseurship can develop in you. By the end of the walk I thought I had developed a bit of an eye for loos. I wrote a few words about the walk and posted some photos on C.R.O.W.’s own blog. Click here to visit.

We finished the tour at this mysterious manhole Shaftsbury Square. Actually, a manhole is a good description for it. During the busiest drinking hours of Friday and Saturday night it rises, revealing a men-only open urinal.

Long Sheelah

2010-12-16T11:14:00.008Z

The tide must have been low when a Google-sponsored satellite passed over Strangford Lough and took this photo. There is Long Sheelah, a pebbly island that is indeed long, and narrow. Even when viewed from outer space it is easy to intuit that there is not a blade of grass on this island. It looks pale and almost ghostly. Soon it will be under the tide again. Presumably, as Long Sheelah is a delicate piece of geology, it would not take a major shift in Strangford Lough’s rhythms to dissolve the island entirely. Yet on Google Maps Long Sheelah does appear substantial enough with its straightness and its gleam that contrasts the water.

From Google Maps, Long Sheelah is the white dash close to dead centre of this image. Click through for a closer look.

From the Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland. Click through for a closer look.

The Ordnance Survey’s Discoverer map of Strangford portrays Long Sheelah with a tone from halfway along the greyscale. It is indicated as half with us and half not, a part-time member of the landscape. Like King Cross’s platform 9¾, it seems intangible.

Long Sheelah is above water most of the time. In his book The Blue Cabin Michael Faulkner has given it some tangibility. He has walked it, he is probably one of the only people to do so regularly. Long Sheelah is “a thin sliver of shells and polished pebbles the length of a football field and the width, a mean high-water, of a medium-sized boat” (page 136). By describing the island Faulkner has played the avant-garde, opening up a space to the rest of us. A place that was right under our noses all the time. On his blog he mentions that since he wrote about Long Sheelah other locals have taken to sailing there and using it as a picnic spot. Like many explorers Faulkner likes to come home with treasure. He tells us that Long Sheelah is the best place on the lough to find the eroded remains of limpet shells. The crowns of the shells have been worn away leaving rings that his wife, the artist Lynn McGregor, strings up into wind chimes to decorate their veranda.

Weathered Map

2010-11-14T20:11:00.011Z

People who have visited Ulster’s outer edge at Glencolumcille may recognise this map. It is in the car park by the beach and has been getting hit by salty wind, sunlight and hard rain for at least fifteen years. Over that time the map has faded. It once charted sites of archaeological significance throughout county Donegal. The words ‘Discover Donegal’s Archaeological Heritage’ can still be discerned in the upper left. Practically every other word on the map has worn away completely. Routes and sites are still visible on the chart but the key has vanished, leaving the sites unexplained and mysterious.

Donegal’s Archaeological Heritage

No one maintains this map but it remains on site, no longer able to do its original job. I do not consider this a problem. Seeing just such relaxed inattentions is one nice thing about visiting these remote spots. This map is far from maintenance teams, far from impact assessments. It does not strive for consistency. But there is nothing wrong with it. The map has merely retired. It has moved into a new phase.

The key

Detail

There are about fifty archaeological sites labelled on the map but, as there is no key, we have no way of knowing what they are. We see only that they exist and the map now tells us, in the broadest possible sense, that we are travelling in an antique land. The map has faded and become impressionist. It is no longer just about archaeology, it has itself become archaeology. We peer at it and wonder what exactly it meant to those people, now long gone, who first erected it. We may be able to detect in its foundations the optimism of an early 1990’s tourist infrastructure initiative. And now, stepping back, we can see how such grand plans fell to the endless drive of the elements. The light, the wind and the rain. All of which combined, especially on the Atlantic seaboard, defeat everything in the end.

Maps on Walls

2010-10-17T22:13:00.005+01:00

The Map of Connections 3.0 is an edition of 15. Number one of the edition is currently on show in the Royal Ulster Academy’s annual show. The exhibition is taking place in the Ulster Museum, Belfast, and will run until the 14th of November.

At the RUA show, 2010. My map has a whole wall to itself. It's a rather narrow wall though.

Number two of that edition and two more of my maps, The Map of Encounters 2.0 (1/15) and The Map of Watchful Architecture 1.0 (12/40), were recently purchased by the National University of Ireland at Maynooth. They are on display in the School of English, Media and Theatre Studies.

Belfast, Rhythm and Rhyme

2010-09-27T11:40:00.009+01:00

I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, / Odessa Street –
(Belfast Confetti, Ciaran Carson)

The New Belfast Community Arts Initiative are in the process of creating a poetry map of Belfast. They are inviting the public to submit works written about, or perhaps from, any Belfast location. This link will take you to their website. They are also inviting memebers of the public to go along to the Black Box, Hill Street on Wednesday 29th September at 6.30pm and make a recording of their poem.

Plenty of poetry has already come from Belfast’s streets and some of it, notably the work of Ciaran Carson, even has a clear cartographical leaning. Only a few nights ago I heard Frank Ormsby reading from his new collection, Fireflies. It includes a cycle of poems called City Journal, a set of works that might fit very well with this project. I do not know whether or not Community Arts Initiative’s map will include previously published work but it may enrich the project.

In words Ormsby maps, among other places, the Limestone Road, the site of a former shirt factory:

… the frame full of girls / arriving on foot / from the side streets / off Limestone Road / years before the first bomb / and its thousand echoes . . .
(The Shirt Factory, Frank Ormsby)

Belfast Rivers on the Rise

2010-08-14T18:31:00.009+01:00

I do not mean to say Belfast’s rivers are physically rising, although come autumn we may witness that too. They are rising in the culture of the city, seeping up through concrete and reminding us to remember them. We all know the Lagan of course, but what of the Farset, the Clowney and the Blackstaff? They have been buried under the city but now some artists and cartographers are bringing them back up.

This is a section of the map only. Visit PLACE’s website here. I like their blog too.

PLACE, the Architecture and Built Environment Centre for Northern Ireland, ran a project recently called Resounding Rivers. It was by Matt Green. It featured a series of sound installations around the city and a map of “Belfast’s forgotten rivers.” Once, we learn from the map, there was a reservoir where the BBC are now located on Ormeau Avenue. Kelly’s Cellars, when it first opened in 1720, stood on a riverbank.

Clues to Belfast’s watery past can still be found in street names. Bank Street was once by a river. Now the river runs under it. Skipper Street was once much closer to the sea and was lined with boarding houses for sailors. PLACE itself is on fountain street. As the name indicates, this is where fresh water was made available via public taps. The water had to be piped in from the hills despite the fact that the Blackstaff river flowed along the end of the street. This was because the all of Belfast’s rivers were tidal, therefore salty and therefore undrinkable. Belfast was not just placed among a network of rivers, it was entangled with the sea.

“It’s like fucking Venice except nobody’s letting on!” says Dermy in Jimmy McAleavey’s play The Sign of the Whale. It had a run in Belfast’s Baby Grand theatre lately. In this drama both the whale and the water flowing under Belfast operate as contrast to violence on the streets. It is set in 1977. Dermy finds a map of Belfast’s forgotten rivers and sets off to follow their routes. During one monologue he becomes enraptured by the possibilities of free water rolling under the troubled city, unpolluted. “You can feel it rushing along. Overcoming obstacles. Clearing the arteries. Flushing the streets a man could say … All the clots and the shit and the impasses. The sticking points ands the standoffs and the stumbling blocks … and … yes, the bodies.”

The Sign of the Whale was a Tinderbox production. The poster image for the play mingles cartography and a whale. There is a certain sense of discovery in the way the whale is being peeled open to expose a map on its bones. There is also a certain amount of horror.

This is a detail only. Belfast c. 1600 to c. 1900. The Making of the Modern City covers the city extensively.

Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle have produced a fascinating map of Belfast’s development, Belfast c. 1600 to c. 1900. The Making of the Modern City. It can be mined for all sorts of information but perhaps the most immediately striking thing is just how much more blue there used to be. From the map we learn that the Lagan was much wider (up to 1833) the Markets were muddy water (until about 1700). The map also shows us the Blackstaff flowing straight through Donegal Square.

Stony Grey Soil of Basra

2010-07-19T12:04:00.003+01:00

“Why did the New York Monaghan Association choose not to carry their banner during the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade in 2003?” This was a question asked during a table quiz in Co. Monaghan lately. Nobody knew the answer, not at my table anyway. And no amount of guessing would have brought us close.

It was because there was a map of Monaghan on the banner and people were mistaking it for Iraq.

Separated at birth? Iraq and Monaghan.

Association member John McKenna explained the problem to a news website: "It came as quite a surprise to us that Monaghan and Iraq had basically the same outline shape. We had been receiving some jeers and comments as we assembled for the parade in New York and we couldn't understand why. Until someone from the Louth Association pointed out the similarity. So for the sake of being able to walk 5th Avenue in peace, we had to carry a simple blue and white banner instead or our ornate traditional banner."

The Tories in Civilisation

2010-06-22T11:55:00.010+01:00

In the 19th century Royal Cartographer James Wyld created a world map grading nations by his option of their level of civilization. He rated them from one to five (I-V). ‘V’ being the civilisation of England and France. ‘I’ being the savage lands of Australia and Africa. I note Wyld marked Ireland with both ‘IV’ and ‘V’. Perhaps this was referencing the contrast between the pale and beyond the pale. Or could it have been his way of saying that Ireland rated a 4.5?

Section of Wyld's map.

Its interesting to see what parts of Ireland Wyld thought worth putting a name on. In Ulster he tags only Tory Island, that three-mile long slab off Donegal. Nowadays this island and its small population seem the very epitome of peripheral, forgotten even. However, up until Wyld’s time Tory Island had often asserted itself in history.

From the mainland Troy is a forbidding looking place, at least on a grey day, and it is easy to believe that it was a last stronghold of pre-history's Fomorians and the site of massive battles. The Fomorian king Balor lived here. His evil eye, which shot flame, is often given as the reason there are no trees on the island.

Taken from a plane, I got this photo from here.

The island was troublesome to Oliver Cromwell during his 1649-50 taming of Ireland. It was used as a base for a Royalist band who harried the mainland. Since then the word Tory has often been applied to groups and factions supportive of Britain’s Royal linage. Hence it is the nickname of the Conservative Party, an organisation to whom Wyld might have given a 5.

Perhaps freshest in the national memory when Wyld was creating this map was the Battle of Tory Island. It was a major naval action fought between France and Britain in 1798, eighteen ships trying to batter one another in to submission off Tory’s west end. Britain won out. This was the last attempt by the French to invade any part of the British Isles. It also brought to an end the United Irishmen’s hopes of obtaining outside support in their push for independence. Theobald Wolfe Tone was aboard the French flagship. He was captured and convicted of treason, committing suicide shortly before he was due to be hanged.

Brand Northern Ireland

2010-05-18T14:12:00.012+01:00

The map of a country or region also functions as a symbol for the place. This is especially the case if all place names and geographical elements are removed from the map, leaving it as a logo. We are well used to seeing the shape of Northern Ireland used for branding.

Northern Ireland, a very familiar shape.

The scholar Benedict Anderson calls this, “map-as-logo.” He reckons such symbolic use of the shape of a state can be a rallying-point for more than just products and services. Such images may have even played an important part in the formation of nationalism, a political force that gained ground with the invention of print and the wide availability of images. “Instantly recognizable, everywhere visible, the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination,” he writes. Nationalism could take shape because nations had been given shape.

Click through for a closer look.

A designer at Wallpaper* magazine brought this one step further lately, creating national brands that do not rely on map shapes at all. Instead these logos use well-known products to create country brands. It is a bit of fun that nonetheless raises questions. Is nationalism a bit like brand-loyalty? Do we live our identities or are we consumers of them?

My branding.

As you can see Northern Ireland did not get its own brand so I have stepped in and made one myself. It is inspired by both Mr Anderson's "map-as-logo" and the brand game-playing from Wallpaper* magazine. Perhaps you name the original source? Answers on a postcard please. Or just use the comments box.

Unable to Map

2010-05-03T15:49:00.002+01:00

A road maintenance crew leave a message for the crew following on behind. I swiped this image from the Facebook profile of a local artist, curator and critic. I hope he will not mind.

On the Shankill

2010-04-27T12:09:00.011+01:00

“The British Connection” and “Change of Address” are two documentaries about Belfast’s Shankill area made in the 1970s. They were shown in the Spectrum Centre, Shankill Road, recently. Both focused on the destruction of the community through development. In a short period the map of Belfast was dramatically redrawn. The bluntest line, causing the shifting or erasure of so much else, was the construction of the Westlink. The Westlink was to be a six-lane chasm bringing traffic to the city centre and to the docks. At the time the documentaries were made the Westlink was still in the future and still being resisted. “As far as were concerned, it’s a monster,” said one interviewee. The monster won.

Stills from both documentaries

In this image the Westlink is going from top to bottom, the Shankill Road from left to right.

An interesting phrase was used. It was said that the Westlink would “divide West Belfast.” It seems to me that the geography has shifted since then. Nowadays it would be more generally perceived that you do not enter West Belfast until you have crossed the Westlink. When you are inside it you are still in the city centre. Look down into the Westlink and it is no surprise that it had this power, it is gaping canyon, a self-proclaiming boundary, well capable of shifting citizens’ perception of space.

The Spectrum Centre is on the corner of the Shankill and Tennet Street

As soon as you cross the Westlink into the Shankill you are greeted by this mural-map. It welcomes you in ten languages and is a plain and practical telling of the neighbourhood. It was nice to see. I used it to keep me right as I walked towards the Spectrum Centre to see the documentaries.

No one would deny that the redevelopment of the Shankill in the 1970s was crudely mishandled. Blame is often pinned on the Troubles. In an earlier entry on this blog I myself suggested that the Westlink is a Trouble’s legacy. However one interesting assertion made in both documentaries was that the redevelopment of the Shankill was not just mishandled because of the pressure of the Troubles. The Westlink had been long planned and the withdrawal of support for streets in its way had begun in the 1960s. Some contributors went so far as to suggest that the Troubles operated as a kind of opportunity, used by developers to break up communities.

Baroness May Blood spoke to the audience afterwards. She is one of the notable locals featured on the mural-map’s frame, second down on the left. Her work for integrated education has been hugely important. She asked us to remember that although the redevelopment of the Shankill was a product of its times and not just the Troubles, the trauma of the Troubles should not be underestimated. Her family was burnt-out of their home during the 1970s. Thousands of other families had similar experiences.

The Shankill Road still has a way to go before it is a pleasant thoroughfare but the overall favour of the discussion was a positive one. Certainly nobody wanted to return to the grey times recorded in the documentaries. As one speaker said, given what the Shankill had gone through, the fact that it has survived at all is something remarkable and hopeful. People want to in be the city even when the city seems to be rejecting them. That kind of perseverance is exactly what could bring life back to those streets in the future.

Election Maps

2010-04-12T20:25:00.008+01:00

As we rumble and grumble towards the election next month, it is a good time to look at Northern Irish electoral maps. These two charts tell a dramatic story. In 1997, out of Northern Ireland’s 18 constituencies, Unionists won 13 seats while Nationalists took 5. Of the 13 Unionist seats, 10 were claimed by the moderate Ulster Unionist Party. They are represented by light blue on this map and can be clearly seen to dominate.

Results of the 1997 general election. Ulster Unionist Party (blue), Social Democratic and Labour Party (light green), Democratic Unionist Party (orange), Sinn Féin (dark green) and the UK Unionist Party (purple). I got both maps from a website called Tallyroom.

2005 general election results in Northern Ireland using redistributed boundaries. Democratic Unionist Party (orange), Sinn Fein (dark green), Social Democratic and Labour Party (light green) and the Ulster Unionist Party (blue).

In 2001 that domination took a knock but they still remained the largest party. But in the next election they were almost wiped out. It appears that, despite the peace process, the voters used that election to retreat to intransigent corners. Hard-liners, Sinn Féin and the DUP, divided Northern Ireland between them. As we came to see in the following years, this was a dysfunctional arrangement. Stormont barely held together and at key moments required steering from London and Dublin. Sinn Féin refuse to take their Westminster seats, leaving a big chunk of Northern Ireland unrepresented in that forum. One may not think this is a problem, pointing out that Sinn Féin were elected and have the mandate to do so. However, as we can see from the 1997 map, there is a sizeable Unionist vote west of the Bann. MLAs have a responsibility to represent the people who don’t vote for them as well as those that do. More recently, media investigations have exposed corruption in the Robinson household. Peter Robinson has complained that the BBC is out to get him. Does he not realise that speaking like that makes him sound like Robert Mugabe? This lack of political acumen would be almost endearing were not so painfully embarrassing that he is First Minster.

It is fair to assume most of 2005’s voters were behind the peace process. Then why vote in that manner? Why not, in the spirit of the times, move towards a middle ground? It may have seemed that Northern Ireland was about to embark on a long period of wrangling and political horse-trading. So the voters took the opportunity to shore up their positions. The more you have, the more you have to trade and the less valuable stuff you have to give away in order to make gains. Such a cynical use of our votes would suggest that we have been paying attention, all these years, to our leader’s manoeuvrings and have been learning from them. Unfortunately, we were short of positive role-models. No one showed us it was possible to vote with bravery and imagination.

Next month we get another chance.

The Map of Connections at Liminal Lands

2010-04-01T17:53:00.006+01:00

Liminal Lands is a project of the artist Michael Mayhew and various individuals and departments from Queen’s University, Belfast. It opens with talks, workshops and screenings and concludes with a performance.

Detail of the map

All events will be at Queen’s Sonic Arts Research Centre, Cloreen Park, off the Malone Road. On Wednesday 7 April 2010, 11:30am, I will present and discuss one of my Border maps, The Map of Connections.

Mental Map of Lurgan

2010-03-25T10:26:00.005Z

If you’re out and about you might come across a free once-off publication called The Floorsucker. It has been produced by young people living in different parts of Northern Ireland. The Floorsucker is a disparate collection of words and images but has an overall theme of promoting mental health awareness amongst the youth. It features maps of Lurgan and Bangor drawn by young residents. They say; “Maps often present an image of a place that doesn’t fit with our experience. For an alternative to Google Earth, Ordnance Survey and the rest, try these …”

Map of Lurgan, detail.

In artistic or academic circles these maps might be called mental maps. It is a fashionable term used to discuss the charting of inner experience as opposed to the outer topography. At least I hope these are mental maps, could there really be so many skulls littering Lurgan?

Map of Lurgan, detail.

I think applying “mental” to “maps” is fine activity. I do it myself. However in a brilliant short essay in The Floorsucker Fionola Merideth suggests that we should take care when applying “mental,” and words like it, to people casually. “… every time we call someone a ‘looper’ or ‘nutter’ – however lightly and jokingly – we’re buying into a discourse which ghettoises and ridicules the people who struggle with the horrible reality of mental illness on a daily basis.”

The Floorsucker is colourful and thoughtful. I was glad to see the young people involved were introduced to the idea of using maps for creative expression. The democratisation of cartography is important. We need alternatives to Google Earth, the Ordnance Survey and the rest.

Mourne Not

2010-03-02T12:10:00.011Z

When the managers of the Mourne Scenic Heritage Trail wanted a new map of the area they put out a call for submissions. I jumped to it, it was an opportunity to make a pretty map and get paid. All the graphic designers who expressed an interest were sent a copy of the rather drab map they were using at the time. The new map was to cover the entire Mourne region but as part of our submission we only had to remap the area marked out by the black square.

The test area to redesign as part of a tender for the job.

I do not know if the winner was the best submission but it is probably better than mine. My proposal was perhaps avant garde in painting sites of historical interest in a narrow range of reds and browns. I like the look of all the fields but it would be a big job to make them true to the landscape.

My effort.

My design is illustrative without losing its utility as a navigational roadmap. This is in contrast to the winning design, which is very attractive but has to bear the note: “This map is for illustrative purposes only. To get the best from this route we recommend you use a good road map.”

The map that went into print. This is only a section.

But the winning design is a very appealing map and appeal is, presumably, what the commissioners were after. I’m sure copies of this map are pinned on walls and on the backs of doors all over the Mournes. Copies have probably made their way to far off parts of the world. I can imagine members of the Mourne diaspora getting misty-eyed over them. The map might not tell you exactly how to get to sites like Maghera Round Tower but it does make you want to go there and this might be the major part of the battle. It is at once a map and an advertisement poster calling you to walk the land.

Lost Years

2010-02-14T15:02:00.005Z

This map is the product of the Farset Health Inequalities Conference in Belfast last year. It charts the north and east wards of Belfast. This is just a screenshot, see the original here. It is not static map but interactive. The user mouses over the wards to discover the average age of death in those areas.

Some disparities are especially striking. It seems a resident of Fortwilliam can expect to live a full fifteen years longer than a resident of Ardoyne. Michael McGimpsey, Northern Ireland’s minister for health, remarks; "It cannot be tolerated that your life expectancy and health status is determined by where you are born." Journalist Malachi O'Doherty goes further, suggesting that this divide should be regarded as a justice issue. In terms of all the years looped of Belfast lives the issue is as profound as sectarian violence ever was. Regarding the disparity between Fortwilliam and Ardoyne O'Doherty remarks; “You can imagine the sense of emergency that sort of statistic would warrant if it was the other way around. We’d be discussing whether to build high-rise flats in Ardoyne and shift the people of Fortwilliam into them so that they can enjoy that fresh mountain air.”

Hear more from O'Doherty on the subject, with visuals, here. If you have 13 minutes you can listen to him reading a fuller essay on the same topic here. This reading, which was given at the Farset Health Inequalities Conference itself, includes a brilliant reminiscence on growing up in a house full of cigarette smoke.

On the Street with Lapsed Protestant

2010-02-01T10:10:00.009Z

Many of the essays and articles collected in Glenn Patterson’s Lapsed Protestant have a bit of urban cartography about them. They are personal stories backgrounded by Belfast’s last two decades and played out in its divided neighbourhoods. In House he recalls seeking a place to live in 1994. Anyone who ever looked for somewhere to live in Belfast will understand Patterson’s topographical hyper-sensitivity. How’s North Belfast? The Ravenhill Road? Or the Cregagh? Too Catholic? Too Protestant? Streets, right next to each other, can differ widely. Metres can matter. Patterson talks us through his negotiation of this terrain and in Lapsed Protestant a kind of impressionist map begins to build up.

A map in words will be perhaps inevitably hazy-edged and blurred but that suits this writer. Patterson is interested in change and seeing the city in flux opened up a creative theme he was able to put in his fiction.

[ … ] Belfast was not - as it so often appeared – static, stalemated but was, like all cities, perpetually in process. It’s hard to overstate the librating effect of this thought on an imagination shaped in large part by the polarities of the Seventies. [From Accommodation and apartmentality]

A story of youthful romance, Love poetry, the RUC and me, brings us an interesting contrast to the usual polemic. The girl came from a wealthy family. The story was not love across the barricades but love across the class divide. However it was still bluntly reflected by the style of streets that were its setting. The girl lived on a street so exclusive it was closed to traffic. If a house went on sale the residents got together to vet prospective buyers. “They were not concerned about religion, but tone.”

Many of the writings collected in Lapsed Protestant bring us right up into the newly configured heart of Belfast. Today we are been given more and more toneless apartment blocks and those secular cathedrals, shopping centres. The polarities of the seventies may be eroding but care must now be taken they are not simply replaced by new divisions, between the mobile and the poor for example, that may be getting built around us in new brick.

Mapping a Town with Purpose

2010-01-07T21:31:00.007Z

This map of Londonderry is to be found in Soho Square, a collection of writing and images published in 1993. The chart is by the illustrator Benoît Jacques. In it Derry is a wild collection of, seemingly, haphazard figures, lines and curves all tossed together in a rectangle. If a map is, at least partly, an attempt to make sense of the world then this it not really a map at all. It appears without purpose. It is a picture of confusion, designed to exclude, designed to make things impossible.

Click through for a closer look.

However the image maybe an accurate portrayal of how we feel about a city when it is new to us. Sure enough, Mr Jacques is not local. Understanding the layout of new streets and lanes can be hard enough. Then there is all that history to negotiate, the interfaces where various groupings mingle or clash. Derry could confuse a foreigner visitor on many levels. So, perhaps this is a good map after all.

Detail from the map.

Soho Square is a strong collection. It features John McGahern, Tom Paulin, Edna O'Brien and Roy Foster among many others. Their writings were put together by Colm Tóibín and in Tóibín's introduction he tells us the true story of a man who lived in his home town, Enniscorthy, when he was a boy. It seems he was a troubled man, one night he ran through the town smashing the windows of businesses.

He did not break the windows at random; he broke the windows of the big stores, and the more unpleasant, uppity shops. He spared the smaller shops, or the shops owned by pleasant, nice shopkeepers. He knew the town like a sociologist [he had] developed a sharp sense of which shopkeepers deserved to have their windows broken and which did not.

Now there’s a map. The man, even as he rampaged, had a precise image of Enniscorthy in his mind. One of the elements his map charted was conviviality. This is the kind of town map, although not necessarily of conviviality, most of us can identify with. Jacques’ map is only the image of a first glance. Most mental maps are intricate but not at all haphazard. They will be networked with lines and intersections as fine as Jacques’ but each will be as purposeful, studied and, to us, necessary as the lines on a circuit board.

Along the north coast

2009-12-18T18:29:00.002Z

I found this postcard map on the internet and no year was given for it. My guess is that it dates from the 1930s. The basalt rock forms at the Giant’s Causeway inspired the geometric layout. I like the modernist-looking rendition of the Bushmills Distillery.

The Illustration of Possession

2009-12-08T19:35:00.014Z

Much Irish mapping was born of the colonial age. In fact Ireland, in the Elizabethan period, was the first country to be systemically mapped. This was not because Ireland was in the firm grip of central control, almost the opposite. It was Ireland’s very untamedness that meant it required mapping. Denis Wood, a writer and theorist on cartography would recognise this, “the truth is,” he writes, “maps are weapons.” Maps just propose territories; various enforcements then follow and make the territory happen. Or, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard neatly put it, “the map precedes the territory.”

Queen Elizabeth’s surveyor and map‐maker in Ireland, at the turn of the 17th century, was Richard Bartlett. He travelled with Lord Mountjoy during his campaign and his maps played a part in the attempt to tame Ulster. The people of Donegal, when Bartlett went to survey their locality, seem to have instinctually grasped that his maps were weapons. In 1609 Sir John Davis, the Irish Attorney General, wrote to the Earl of Salisbury of Bartlett’s fate. “ … when he came into Tyrconnell the inhabitants took off his head, because they would not have their country discovered.” But this rebellious action was by then too late. The Earls had flown. Bartlett and others had already produced folios of charts. The mapping of Ulster had preceded. Now it was territory.

Detail from the above map.

But Bartlett’s work also shows that maps were something other than a weapon of colonisation. Take his map of South East Ulster, 1603, it represents Dungannon and Tullaghoge. This chart is highly illustrative and not as directly tactical as many of Bartlett’s others. It is as much a celebration of victory as a map. At the bottom in the centre we see the inauguration stone of the O’Neill has been claimed and above it, Dungannon. With a graphic stridency, the English flag flies from the fort, backed in flat blue and centrally located on the page. It says, South‐East Ulster: under new management. Not just a map, it is the illustration of possession.

Map of Friends

2009-11-21T14:04:00.012Z

With social networking sites like Facebook we are able to visualise schemas of our relationships. We know someone who knows someone who knows someone who we, and here a circle is drawn, happen to know too. This social cartography is drawn in the head more than on paper and is easy to imagine as building up into complicated patterns of criss-crossing lines. There will also be a few singular lines that disappear off into unshared personal history, a friend that none of your other friends know or have even meet. They’re special those ones, they might live far away, or be in prison.

Here someone has used InFlow to chart his Twitter contacts. I took the image from here.

InFlow is a graphic programme that enables you to render databases in diagrammatic form. It could be interesting to apply it to your list of Facebook or Twitter friends, and their friends. One degree of separation ought to be enough to produce a lively chart. Large businesses take an interest in tools like InFlow too. They wish to find out how their staffs are intermingling and working together, or failing to. Consultants and companies have popped up to create the charts and help managers interpret them. According to the websites of these service providers there are many advantages to be had by charting staff networks. I will quote a selection of the reasons mainly because the jargon is irresistible, it’s a bit like being smooth-talked by an over-confident android.

Focus attention on the importance of tacit knowledge and intangible assets; Uncover your best knowledge resources and conduits in the organization; Understand what happens in the white space in the organization chart; Discover the holes in your information flows and knowledge exchanges; Identify key connections that must not be broken in reorganizations or downsizing; Develop existing and new leaders in agile and adaptive organizations; Optimize knowledge ecosystems; Expose knowledge bottlenecks, underperformers and overworked employees. Taken from: www.kmcluster.com

Given that all of the above seems an evolution of the internet age it is impressive that John Carson’s Friendship Map was created way back in 1976. He used printed maps, ruled lines and glue to produce a pre-digital diagram of his social network.

John Carson, Friendship Map, Photographs on map, 1976. It was exhibited in The Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, lately.

Carson’s map features three types of connection. “Direct link lines,” going from the artist’s home to the homes of friends. “Indirect link lines,” they link to friend’s homes but also to places where they and the artist associate, for example the pilot station in Carrickfergus. And finally “secondary link lines” that connect friends of the artist who also know each other. Carson has covered his map in these lines, evoking a web of friendship pegged out across the city. It is also worth remembering that 1976 was the height of the Troubles. That was not a time of free-and-easy interaction in Belfast however this map tells an alternative story, one that was going on despite the Troubles.

John Carson lived in Carrickfergus when the map was made and it is given close-up.

Carson's Belfast friends, 1976.

A programme like InFlow could be used to describe the straight facts of the Friendship Map. However the total content of this map is not reducible to vector graphics. There is a warmth in that Carson drew every line by hand. He visited every person to take every photograph and printed each in a darkroom. Then he cut each to size and pasted them to his map. A digital diagram may enable the viewer to see “tacit knowledge and intangible assets” but Carson’s handcrafted map gives more. It enables us to see landscape as a place where lives unroll, overlap and run side by side. A place where people do not just live, nor just live together, but live with togetherness.

Townlands

2009-10-28T10:20:00.004Z

“Townlands are the ancient and generally accepted divisions of the country,” wrote Thomas Spring Rice in 1824. His report was to propose which categories of boundary ought to be included in the upcoming Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Townlands were, and still are, an important measure of locality and often vital to a rural person’s sense of home. When the Ordnance Survey began no one had any idea that Ireland had over 67000 townlands. In the years to come each would be charted and each name recorded.

Section of the Discoverer Series, 1/50,000 scale.

On the reverse of the same map, the townland map.

Ordnance Survey maps of Northern Ireland have included the names of townlands but not always their boundaries. However the latest edition of the Discoverer Series has elevated the townland once again. On the reverse of the sheet, which was up to now blank, we are presented with a townland map. It is drained of colours, only using red and a few tones from a greyscale. Quite apart from any practical use it may have the townland map is also a thing of intrigue. Does the web of townlands imply a friendly landscape of interlocking communities? Or does it suggest an oppressive net of ancestral knots?

Where few people live, high boggy ground, the townlands are large. In other places they are small, I see one in south Fermanagh that is only about 150 metres square. In these cases the name it is labelled with cannot be fitted inside its border.

And what names townlands can have. Some of my favourites from Sheet 27 of Northern Ireland’s Discoverer Series are: Ummera, Tattycam, Dooross, Gubdoo, Stumpys Hill, Lusty More, Sheepwalk, Greaghatirrive, Bunnablaneybane and Bun.

Back to Bank/Bob Marley Square

2009-10-15T19:05:00.003+01:00

This entry is a follow up on the story from 2 September 2009.

Returning to Bank/Bob Marley Square lately I discovered that Belfast City Council have raised the stakes in battle over the square’s name. They have covered up the unofficial hand-painted sign, calling the space Bob Marley Square, with placards of information about the cultural history of the area. Now, if the reggae fans wish to reassert the name in the manner they’ve been used to they’ll have to rip down the signs or paint over them. Then, one assumes, it will be war.

Here we have official council-sponsored culture, in very good taste, attempting to overwrite an unsanctioned outburst that may not be in such good taste but nonetheless vibrate and meaningful. Belfast City Council should loosen their grip a little here. Do they think it is their job to ensure that all Belfast’s place names stay the same forever and ever? A strong city is a place that is able to consider evolutions rather than clamp down on them immediately. The placards make no mention of the latest story in the cultural history of the square, namely that some locals are attempting to rename it. Only long-gone events are included, events that now feel sepia-toned and safe.

I suspect some of historical events recorded on the placards caused controversy in their time, such as the arrival of “The Fadgies,” a group of Irish speakers from Co. Louth who colonised the area in the mid 19th Century. Perhaps some of the events were even in bad taste, it is a shame that a river once flowed there but has been long since covered over (“Bank” it turns out does not refer to an institution but to a river bank). One thing is for sure, the stories on the placards evoke an area that was vibrant and constantly evolving. There is irony in that the placards have been deployed to try and put a stop to the same kind of energy they supposedly celebrate.

Gardens in the Sky

2009-10-07T23:25:00.006+01:00

“A certain quality of loveliness,” this was the phrase the presenter on one of those old house restoration programmes on television kept using. A certain hue of 19th century floor tile, the roughness of a roof support or the angle of a pitched floor could be deemed to possess this quality, this “certain quality of loveliness.” He used the phrase perhaps five or six times on the episode I watched. He ascribed it to certain features it as if it was an accepted measure of architectural worth, as ready-readable as the Richter Scale. It got on my nerves after a while.

Yet, I have to admit that a “certain quality of loveliness” is exactly what Gemma Anderson’s map Wild Photograms has.

It is a map of a small part of Belfast between High Street and North Street. In City Supplements, a publication produced by PS squared, www.pssquared.org, Anderson explains the map's inception:

Rather than concentrating on street level, I gazed up at the brickwork of the buildings looking for plant life. I was surprised by how many plants were living in the nooks and crannies of derelict buildings. These ‘gardens in the sky’ growing on roof tops, edges and window ledges. The area now appeared more curious and rich walking amongst these plant outcrops [ … ] I have used the stems of these plants to construct a map and documented the full plant forms as photograms, their locations identified on the map.

www.gemma-anderson.co.uk is the artist’s website.

Bob Marley or a Bank Manager?

2009-09-02T10:53:00.006+01:00

If enough people agree to call a place by a certain name, other than its official name, then the new name will be accepted eventually. Or, as is the case with Londonderry, the official name will at least not be allowed to get too comfortable. I suspect that in the majority of spoken and written references that particular city is called Derry, over 300 years after it was officially labelled Londonderry.

Typical

Bank Street is in the centre of Belfast. On one end it opens into a fair-sized public space. It is my understanding that the council know this space as Bank Square although neither my Ordnance Survey map of Belfast nor Goggle Earth have it labelled with that name or any other. Perhaps spotting this apparent vacancy some local reggae fans have taken it upon themselves to name it Bob Marley Square. They see Bob Marley as representing the values of peace, love and unity. They have fought for the name by painting ‘Bob Marley Square’ up on one wall in big letters and they keep repainting the sign after Belfast city council removes it. “It takes about 40 minutes to get it back up again,” one of the organisers told the Irish Times (1 August 2009).

The sign on Bob Marley/Bank Square. I suspect the use of the Irish word “Cearnóg” means many will regard the organiser’s vision of peace, love and unity as having a nationalist tinge.

An undeniable mark will have been made on the mental map of Belfast if people begin using the name in ordinary conversation. I have not heard ‘Bob Marley Square’ mentioned casually yet but it seems to me that if enough people use the name then the reggae fans will eventually succeed in making it the official title. Perhaps they will never see it themselves but their children might, or their children’s children. We have 300 years to play with.

They have the support of Natty Wailer, a member of Bob Marley’s original band, who now lives in Galway. He believes that taking on the place name would be a positive gesture towards inclusiveness and peace in Belfast. Although he adds; “I am not a politician, I’m a Rasta man.”

Two ways to map Rathlin

2009-08-04T23:16:00.012+01:00

There are as many styles of map as there are political views, vested interests, and even hobbies. This map, below, was for the use of a specific group of visitors to Rathlin Island last year.

The letters and numbers are the codes of the WAB squares that cover this Northern Irish island. WAB means Worked All Britain. We are now in the company of amateur radio operators, a whole culture of callsigns, occupied bandwidths, and black boxes. Quoting the Bangor and District Amateur Radio Society website (where I also found the map): “As can be seen from the map, the Island spans three WAB squares, D05, D15 and D14.”

Little did we know, as we walked the earth, we were passing through things called WAB squares. This is a landscape only visible to amateur radio operators and invisible to everybody else. However, the WAB squares are not a totally alternative mapping system. They work within standard grids. Rathlin Island is found in square D of the Irish Grid.

Rummaging around in my studio I found a quick map of Rathlin that I drew a few years ago. You will discern that I was more interested in lighthouses than squares of any sort. They are represented by giant light bulbs.

It is indicative of the dangerous seas around this small island that it needs three lighthouses. But despite them there have been over forty shipwrecks on Rathlin's rocks over the years.

The International

2009-07-27T10:26:00.006+01:00

The Antrim Area Plan 1984-2001, published in 1989 by the Department of the Environment for Northern Ireland Town & Country Planning Service is, as you can probably imagine, a rather dry report. But the black outline on this map from the report is interesting. Is it a bird? Is it a fish? I think it is a cross between the two, making a dive for the waters of Lough Neagh.

In reality the contour lines demarcate areas of noise pollution around Belfast International Airport. According to the report the “Noise and Number Index (NNI) contours were calculated using a complex formula which takes account of estimated growth in traffic, assumptions about the types of aircraft in use, and aircraft flight paths.”

The outer black line is the zone between 40 and 50 NNI. Structures, even houses, can be built within it but it is recommended that they are sound insulated. The areas of red-line hatching sticking out from each end of the runway are Pubic Safely Zones. There was to be no building of any sort within these areas. Take-offs and landings, as we all know, are the most dangerous parts of flight.

Map of Ulster Cottages

2009-07-15T13:13:00.016+01:00

I have an old friend in Donegal. By old I mean that he is over eighty years of age. He owns a cottage that I sometimes rent for a few days. I am quite attached to the place and its view of Donegal bay. It is a traditional cottage, with a range and a thatched roof, and is the house he grew up it. Now he lives elsewhere but he has not done up the cottage for the tourist trade. It remains how it was when he lived in it. Turf is the only means of heat, there are only two electric sockets for the whole place and, on the roof, is a practical but ungroomed thatch. My friend takes a certain amount of pride in the fact that he takes no government grant to preserve the traditional thatch. He just does it himself, growing the crop, drying it and thatching the roof wherever necessary. Yes, he climbs up there and lays it himself, at his age.

My Donegal retreat.

I see that this cottage does not feature in Alan Gailey’s survey The Thatched Houses of Ulster. It is not on the map that shows the location of all his correspondents.

From Ulster Folklife, Volume 7, 1961. Published by The Ulster Folklife Society in Belfast.

I imagine my friend was too busy to bother with questionnaires, assuming he even received one. Or, as a man who takes care off his own thatch, he may have instinctually baulked at nosy questions. Gailey, researching for the Ulster Folk Museum, sent out 400 questionnaires to the owners of traditional cottages and got 200 filled in and returned in time for a 1961 report. He collated and mapped some of the information.

Ulster’s spread of the bed out-shot feature.

One of the maps records instances of ‘bed out-shots.’ The east of the province is strikingly clear of this 19th century architectural feature. The further west you go, the more there are. Sure enough my friend’s cottage in Donegal has one. The bed out-shot is an extension. It is usually out the back, as shown in the image below, and housed a bed next to the hearth. It was traditional for this bed to be used by the oldest members of the family. The map hints at how trends can be patterned on geography, kept local by community and the unpollinated style of untravelled tradesmen, builders in this case. Note, for example, the straight line of white circles following the river Bann north from Lough Neagh (I have indicated it with a red line). There are cottages with bed out-shots all around it but none built in that particular valley.

Cottage in North Donegal. On the right, a small bed out-shot.

In Co. Down Gailey placed a few question marks. Here are cottages with what looked like bed out-shots, but they were so isolated as to possibly require another explanation. Gailey suggested it was equally likely these out-shots were used to accommodate a loom, not a bed, in the homes of hand-loom weavers. These out-shots normally had a window to provide the weaver with light to work by.

Owen's Island

2009-06-29T16:20:00.014+01:00

Inishowen is the northern part of Co.Donegal.

A few years ago there was some anger and some amusement when a government publication was produced in Dublin featuring a map showing Inishowen as part of the North, not the Irish Republic. Over 100,000 brochures had to be recalled and reprinted. Inishowen’s Fine Geal counsellor was fuming:

"If Donegal is the forgotten county, then Inishowen is the forgotten part of the forgotten county. It is unforgivable that this got printed before it was noticed" (Irish Independent 25 May 2006).

If the map was the work of a professional cartographer they might have lost their job. If it was produced, as is more likely, by a graphic designer then they were probably just laughed at for a year or two. They are probably still being ribbed about it today. It is in fact one of Ireland’s more famous anomalies; that its most northern point is in the South.

The Irish Independent went on to report: “It is not the first time the Donegal peninsula has been cut loose. A similar error was made in 1997 when an Oireachtas PR office released a school video on how the political system worked. It included a map of Ireland depicting Inishowen as part of Co. Derry instead of Donegal”

Looking further back into the history of Ulster mapping it seems Inishowen was constantly getting “cut loose.” And not just ceded to another political body, but forced into insular independence. It was often portrayed as a separate landmass.

Section of Provincia Ultoniae, 1645

Take, for example, Jaonnem Janssonius’ map Provincia Ultoniae, from 1645. Here Inishowen has become an island and, furthermore, Malin head is another island north of it. The watery gap is too wide to be a mere river although it may be that Janssonious was building on a succession of older maps that gradually exaggerated a river flowing here until it became a full channel.

A section of Bartlett's map of Ulster.

Provincia Ultoniae bares strong similarities to Richard Bartlett’s A generalle description of Ulster, 1602/03. Here Inishowen is also breaking away, although not quite so starkly. The divide can be read as a river and this perhaps indicates the source of the “Inishowen as island” falsehood. However, it was a completely inaccurate source in the first place. There was no river here. Cartographical historian, J.H. Andrews has commented on this habit of joining different river systems by imaginary inland waterways. He writes that, “they may represent strips of boggy ground where the direction of drainage was indeterminate” (The Queen’s Last Mapmaker, 2008, p. 63). Sure enough, the land is shallower at those locations. Nowadays these are the routes of the roads linking Londonderry to Burnfoot and back over to Muff. It is quite a jump to go from boggy lowlands to full sea channel but so it went in an era when individuals had to judge, by eye, entire terrains.

Nonetheless, Richard Bartlett’s maps of Ulster stand out as the work of an uncommon talent. To this day they are interesting cartographically, historically, but also as art objects. I am sure nobody ever laughed at him.

Incidents and Events

2009-06-18T15:22:00.010+01:00

Currently on show in the Irish Museum in Modern Art, Dublin, are recent donations to the Museum’s collection. One room focuses on the North. Two pieces are from the heady days of 1968 and 69, when the civil rights movement had people taking to the streets and roads of Northern Ireland. Oisín Kelly’s The Marchers is a small cast aluminium piece of figures walking together, dedication and labour is hinted at in the upward incline of their march. The figures are bound together and faceless, contributing to a sense of singular purpose. Overlooking it is Robert Ballagh’s canvas Marchers, 1968. Here more marchers are being observed from a distance through surveillance lenses. They are silhouetted and therefore faceless too, but on this canvas their loss of individual identity gives rise to a sense of threat.

A photography of Willie Doherty's Border Incident. The original is a cibachrome mounted on aluminium, Ed 3/3. 122 x 183 cm

‘Threat’ and ‘surveillance’ are words that usually feature in discussions of Willie Doherty’s work. Border Incident is from 1994, by which time dramatic political action meant something different from marches. Here we are beyond faceless, it is a landscape that is drained of human life and instead has become the stage of incidents. We are also beyond any sense of singular purpose and left counting sporadic acts in an era of statistics. Doherty’s use of dry-eyed photography also contributes to this coldness, especially when contrasted with Ballagh’s and Kelly’s hand-crafting.

Incidents always have a time and place. It is the word the police use in crime reports. They are, I suppose, the nexus where time and geographical coordinates meets in a brutal flash. On the other hand the civil rights marches were more like ‘events.’ Events also have a time and place. Landscapes are places where events and incidents work to shape destiny.

Wall Vs Fence

2009-05-26T12:21:00.016+01:00

English playwright David Hare (The Vertical Hour, Gethsemane, and the recent screen adaptations of The Hours and The Reader) was on the radio last night talking about the new linear structure built between Israel and Palestine.

Banksy on the Green Line.

Linguistically, Hare aligned himself to the Palestinians whereas I already, one line into this entry, have minded my language, limiting myself to a non-descriptive phrase, “the linear structure.” Even the word wall is loaded in this context. The Palestinians call the structure the Racist Segregation Wall while the Israelis call it the Separation Fence. Of course, walls and fences have a lot in common but their distinguishing factors are enough to make this a sore point in the propaganda war. Is Israel’s project a fence? Practical, but light-permitting and thin. Or is it a wall, oppressive and shadow-casting? Hare suggests the Israeli refusal to use the word wall is a symptom of denial, or plain dishonest.

This diagram shows how a solid wall is deployed in sections because of the danger of snipers. Image taken from an essay called Israel’s Security Fence. Read it here.

Benny Morris, Israeli historian, points out that the divider is actually mainly fence, less than 10% of it is the solid wall Hare describes. The Israeli pressure group that fought for the building of a divider was called Fence For Life.

I have seen many images of the divider but only ever from concrete sections. These images include artistic interventions by the spray-can wizard, Banksy. I suspect the image of the divider as an concrete wall, as opposed to a fence, is winning out in the wider world. Hare suggests the Palestinians know the power of an image.

And along the cement wall, as we enter the town [Ramallah], is the blossoming graffiti. Oh yes, there's a parallel here and it's being made with aerosols and poster paints, so that every visitor will be forced to think "Ah! Berlin!"

If you are reading this within a week of publication then you may still be able to listen to David Hare’s broadcast of his essay “Wall” on the BBC Radio 4 website listen again page. If you are too late for that then you can read it here instead, thanks to the New York Review of Books.

Flag Charts

2009-05-19T11:11:00.013+01:00

Artist Shahee Ilyas has reduced the flags of the world to their component colours, displayed in proportion. These pie charts suggest countries born of big but arbitrary decisions. They are all made of exactly the same ingredients, blended in different proportions.

www.shaheeilyas.com

The popular colours are those one would expect; white, blue, green, red. It is perhaps more interesting to note the colours that are barely used or absent altogether, like pink, purple and grey.

Shared Horizons

2009-05-16T16:28:00.017+01:00

The warlike range of symbols on the Map of Watchful Architecture leads to it getting some brisk readings. I have printed and distributed many copies of the map by now, and exhibited it, enough exposure to have noticed this theme. Sometimes viewers aim merely to place the map, as quickly as possible, in their pre-set political views. For this reason The Map of Connections is in some ways more successful. It not only maps a new topic, it does it with a new language. This results in it receiving closer reading. It cannot be handled any other way.

The knee-jerk reactions are too bad because my map of defensive architecture does actually tell a shared story. I work hard to make it even-handed.

Sinn Féin's map. Section only. Monaghan and Armagh.

A truly warlike and now outdated map on a Sinn Féin website marks the locations of Northern Irish security structures. It is a limited view. The map has no interest in the historical. Furthermore it completely blacks out the south of Ireland, ignoring, for example, the Irish Army barracks in Monaghan (decommissioned recently as well).

Elsewhere on the Internet is FAIR, Families Acting for Innocent Relatives. They aim “to ensure that the great sacrifice of the Unionist Community in South Armagh will never be forgotten.” This website has a grim reactionary tone, it is a surprise to read anyone still arguing for the securing of the Border. Alternative voices are dismissed thoughtlessly as “glossy chat.” But that seems harmless when compared to headlines like: “Orange Halls Attacked By Catholics In Co Tyrone.” (November 2008) The vandals were not caught, their religion is assumed, probably quite reasonably, but does FAIR consider vandalism to be a religious rite? Surely “Orange Hall Attacked by Vandals in Co. Tyrone” would be a more correct description. Or, if it is facts we are concerned with, then simply: “Orange Hall Attacked in Co. Tyrone.”

FAIR's map of security, south Armagh.

The FAIR website has a map of security structures too. They would prefer the watchtowers and checkpoints were still in place. They say it “is madness to reduce the level of security.” But, and this brings me back to defensive architecture being a shared past, where did they get their map? They lifted it from the Sinn Féin website. They just changed Sinn Féin’s oppressive term “spy post” to a friendly “surveillance tower.” On my map I call them watchtowers but whatever they are called, they are a common story.

Claiming High Ground

2009-05-05T17:30:00.012+01:00

An eight-foot wide Map of Watchful Architecture is on show until the 10th of May in the Art on the Hill exhibition, Old Territorial Garages, Castlehill, Dungannon. Thank you to Megan Johnson and Dermot Burns, of the Millennium Court Portadown, for inviting me to exhibit and helping me install the map.

Visit Dungannon

Castlehill is the heart and the highest point of Dungannon, from there you can see Slieve Gullion to the south and Slieve Gallon to the north. Between them, to the east, Lough Neagh looks like an inland sea. What you cannot see is anything to the west. This is because Castlehill is still host to military structures, lying unused, and tall fences block off sections of the hilltop. Occupation of the high ground has long been military strategy, Castlehill has hosted an O’Neill fort and a plantation era house too. Now it is a small ghost town of vacated army installations. This would be a waste anywhere but as centrepiece and highest point of Dungannon it is a travesty. The Borough Arts Forum are to be congratulated for transforming one of the buildings into an exhibition space for their arts festival, what would it take to make such a change permanent?

The view west from Castlehill

For me the fences are the most poignant part of the brutalised zone. Even if they are required they could surely be lowered or perforated. I recall that in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City he lists four or five basic human entitlements in relation to their environment. One is the right to “travel about.” What would Le Corbusier make of a place that will not even allow its citizens to look about?

The corncrake

I did take my right to roam elsewhere. On a hillside to the south of Dungannon I meet Kathryn Nelson painting a bird on the grass. She uses the same material used to mark-out football fields. Her massive rendering of the corncrake is also a feature of the Dungannon Arts Festival. It is hard to see close up but from across the lake the image is impressive. She explained to me that corncrakes were once heard around this lake, but sadly not recently. The distinctive harsh "crek crek" call of the male during the mating season is fading from Ulster in the same way Kathryn’s image will gradually fade from the field.

Gravitational Attraction

2009-04-27T16:59:00.021+01:00

A little while ago the European Space Agency launched GOCE, its gravity mapping satellite. GOCE stands for Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer. It is already in orbit but in a couple of weeks its batteries will be fully charged-up, its systems calibrated and its work will begin. Unlike a typical satellite, with spindly aerials, disks, and protruding panels, this satellite is streamlined and sleek. GOCE needs aerodynamic features because it will fly at only 250km above the surface of the Earth, lower than most Earth orbiting satellites, and will encounter wisps of atmosphere. It will plot the earth’s gravitational field to a higher level of accuracy than we are currently able.

GOCE's mission will require a high level of stability, hence the fins and its ion-propulsion engine. See an animation here: www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GOCE_animation/

Things have different weights when in different places. The gravitational attraction an object experiences, its desire to rush to the centre of the earth, is effected by the presence of irregularities in the shape of the earth, the uneven distribution of mass beneath the crust, and the presence of mountains or even large buildings. The intensity of the desire varies and the GOCE will map this variable terrain. It will draw a surface of equal gravitational force, sometimes called the geoid, as it dips above and below the Earth's physical surface. A science blogger gives this illustration:

Say you take a one-pound weight, and you walk along the surface of the Earth. If the density of the ground underneath you begins to increase, the gravitational force will increase and the weight will get heavier. To counteract this, you raise the weight up higher - therefore reducing gravity's influence. If, as you walk along, you continue to adjust the height of the weight so that it always weighs one pound, you will be following the surface of the geoid. www.scientificblogging.com/welcome_my_moon_base/goce_aerodynamic_satellite_will_map_geoid

So, those African women carrying supplies on their heads have actually found a way to make the load a fraction lighter. A very small fraction.

One of the most useful outcomes of GOCE’s work will be an increased understanding of the movement of the oceans. But, personally, I am looking forward to the maps. Gravitational forces at play have been mapped before. The difference between standard gravity and the actual gravity found in a certain place is sometimes called the Bouguer anomaly. I examined a Bouguer Anomaly Map of Northern Ireland recently.

From the Bouguer Anomaly map

This is a detail from southern Armagh. It can be seen that Slieve Gullion is a highly positive area. This would probably make a kind of sense to anyone familiar with this mountain. It is a proud and distinguished peak and seems to deserve any form of special attention. Slieve Gullion is an extinct volcano standing apart from other mountains but the highest in the county nonetheless. I wonder if this apartness, free from softening influences, contributes to the large positive Bouguer anomaly wrapped around the mountain. Geologists reckon the strength of this anomaly indicates a high-density mass of rock concealed under the mountain. I can report that, when climbing Slieve Gullion lately, my backpack sure seemed heavier as I approached the peak. But seriously, I wonder could a mountain with a large positive Bouguer anomaly, such as Slieve Gullion, be noticeably more tiring to climb?

Gullion at sunset, image taken from here.

Slieve Gullion’s powerful presence also means it has made frequent appearances in myths, legends, and more recent writings from Northern Ireland. It seems the mountain carries an unusually high cultural weight too. In the meantime we can watch for the GOCE, a fast-moving dot passing 250km above our heads.

Dungannon Exhibition

2009-04-18T19:36:00.010+01:00

As part of its arts festival Dungannon borough will host an art exhibition in the old Territorial Army garages on Castlehill. The organisers remark that this exhibition space is a contested site. It has been the high vantage point of local powers for centuries, an O'Neill site, a plantation era townhouse, and most recently a base for the British Army. To reflect this history artists were invited to submit work concerned with the transformation or the claiming of space, either personal or public.

I thought they might like The Map of Watchful Architecture, and sure enough, it has been accepted and will feature in the Art on the Hill exhibition. It runs from 1 May until the 10 May 2009. I will print the map on paper for this show, large.

Concrete Borders

2009-03-16T19:35:00.019Z

I visited Paris a while ago. One day I took the Metro, line four, to the last stop to visit the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt. The metro ends close but not quite as far as the market. After emerging from the metro you walk along a street and under Paris’ massive ring road: Boulevard Périphérique. It completely encircles the city. By now it is the accepted boundary marker between Paris centre, population about 2 million, and the suburbs, with a population three or four times higher.

Boulevard Périphérique at Porte de Clignancourt

Within Western Europe these kinds of concrete boundaries probably have as much significance as international frontiers. They are certainly a more imposing physical manifestation. They mark the dividing line between the rich, (mobile and transnational) and the poor (impeded and disentitled). Paris’ ring-road is a starker example than most. According to the Guardian recently it is “the moat that protects the city’s 2 million people from at least 6 million others who live outside in the high-rise, ethic ghettoes or suburban sprawl, choked by dismal public transport and shabby green space.”

The ring-road/border

There is a racial aspect to this division, a bubbling tension. It is no surprise that the Paris riots, occurring repeatedly over the last few years, have been taking place beyond the Boulevard Périphérique. Sociology professor Jeffrey Reitz told an online news site: "It's not the immigrants [rioting], but their children, who are a very different group of people. The second generation can't go back as easily and have been told in school they should be treated equally. When it doesn't happen, there's disappointment."

The Class (2008)

A couple of weeks ago I went to see The Class. It is a film set in a multi-ethnic school in the Paris suburbs. At one point a boy, of African roots, insists he is French and is mocked for it by other boys in the class. In another sharply observed scene the teacher is surprised when two girls in his class say they go to Galleries Lafayette (a city centre shop) at the weekends. He is impressed by their ability to transgress an unnamed boundary. It is a boundary that is largely cultural but reinforced by the ring-road, officially enacted by urban design.

Belfast has something similar. The Westlink is a concrete canyon separating troublesome and riotous parts of Belfast, both Catholic and Protestant, from the city centre. The dual carriageway was originally meant to ring the city centre but public opposition put a stop to it. What we have is quite enough. The trench is a brutal piece of uncivil engineering, putting a stop to free mingling and handing the city over to the motorcar. The Westlink is a deep slice running very close to the city’s heart.

Artist Willie Doherty’s image of the Westlink, 1988, evokes the Westlink’s massive indifference

Now Paris is set to address the problem of its internal border. Ten teams of architects and urban planners were invited to submit proposals and their ideas were unveiled lately. President Sarkozy wants to create a Greater Paris, a new urban band that would be environmentally progressive and boldly designed. One architects' group, Richard Rogers, told the Guardian on March 12th that the biggest challenge facing Paris was the "enormous disparity" and "staggering psychological barrier" between the centre of the city and the world beyond the ring-road.

An image from the Richard Rogers group proposal

Watchtowers in Harlem

2009-03-11T17:48:00.017Z

The Map of Watchful Architecture marks the location of watchtowers along Northern Ireland’s Border. Many of them are gone now. A more recent deployment of watchtowers is in New York City. The NYPD has installed a tower in a Harlem neighbourhood in an effort to cut crime. It is called Sky Watch and it gives the officer sitting inside a high vantage point from which to monitor the area. The officer in the booth has access to a spotlight, sensors, and four cameras. The whole unit is portable. It can be towed from site to site. The New York Times reports that Harlem residents like the towers. “Sometimes I was scared to pass here,” said one resident, “but guess what, that doesn't happen anymore. It’s a kind of deterrence and it's good." The NYPD hopes to have three more towers soon.

Back in Northern Ireland, watchtowers always got a bad press and have been subject to a certain amount of dark fascination. “A double line of ugly watchtowers protrudes from the pretty little mountains,” according to issue 255 of the New Internationalist. Yet there were some who simply liked to see watchtowers on local hills and would have liked to see more. They represented security.

A 2000 Year Tradition

2009-03-03T20:20:00.018Z

I want The Map of Watchful Architecture to help us see old structures afresh and new structures in a historical light, bringing new illumination. The map represents certain structures, perhaps built centuries apart, as fundamentally the same. For example, the Border was predicted by the 2nd century structure of the Dorsy, an official entrance into Ulster. Nowadays, just south of the Border the Garda Síochána perform spot checks on buses, looking for illegal migrants. Instead of two categories, 1st Century Gate and 21st Century Immigration Control, my map uses just one: checkpoint. Immigration control is revealed as inheritor of a long tradition while at the same time an ancient site is drawn into the contemporary dynamic.

Detail from The Map of Watchful Architecture 1.0

Adding to the diversity of checkpoints in Ireland is a timber castle discussed in Archaeology Ireland lately (Volume 21, No. 2. Issue No. 80). We are well used to seeing old stone towers in the landscape and it is interesting to realise that once wooden towers dotted the landscape too. None have survived but there is documentary evidence for them. One particular wooden tower is referred to in reports, letters, and we even have an image. In 1575, under the earl of Essex, the English constructed a fort on a strategic crossing-point of the River Blackwater, near modern day Blackwatertown. This construction was to control access in and out of western Ulster. It was the gateway to a contested territory, Hugh O’Neill’s lands in South-East Tyrone.

Apologies for the low quality of this reproduction

On the one side of the Blackwater the tower was of stone. On the other side is an impressive wooden tower, four stories high. It is the darker tower in the above image. Huge uprights at each corner are obviously the major structural features. Note the bridge; it seems to link both towers. Anyone using it certainly had to pass through the right-side structure and possibility the timber tower too. This makes the structure a filtering installation. A sixteen century checkpoint. Part of a long tradition going back, and forward.

The Lonely Page

2009-03-01T21:53:00.003Z

This Friday, the 6th of March, I will be reading extracts from my Border journal at the Lonely Page creative writer’s conference, Queen’s University, Belfast. Hopefully the organisers will allow me to stick up a couple of my maps for the evening as well. The event kicks off at 8.00pm. I see Rodge Glass, former secretary and now biographer to Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, will be reading too.

Of Walking in Ice

2009-02-20T17:24:00.013Z

Herzog on location with Fitzcarraldo, released in 1982.

In 1974 the German filmmaker Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man), heard a friend in Paris was ill. Herzog had a plan to save her from death.

I took a jacket, a compass and a duffel bag with the necessities. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself. (foreword)

Herzog walked from Munich to Paris. The book Of Walking in Ice is the record of the journey. It is a route map in words. A scrapbook of images, signs, and encounters. One aspect of Herzog’s journey, that makes me feel a bit of a softy, is that he sets off in bleak mid-winter. Most of my Border walking is done in good weather. Looking at my bookshelves I find I am not alone in minding the weather. Iain Sinclair’s walks, such as those recorded in Edge of the Orison, are planned, short, and warm. Colm Tóibín, Walking along the Border, encountered some drizzle but never really suffered. He was never far from a B&B and a fry. In contrast, Herzog’s need to walk was so intense that he set off just when travelling was hardest. Even if this was just a stylistic choice, and I think it is not, then it would be a compelling and original one.

There is more. Herzog’s journey is continuous. No weekend hikes strung together artificially on the page. He walks three solid weeks on a low budget. At night he breaks into holiday chalets for a dry place to sleep. With aching feet, dirty hair, and soaking clothes Herzog starts to look, feel, and perhaps genuinely be, deranged.

Then snow, snow, rainy snow, snowy rain; I curse Creation. What for? I am so utterly soaked that I avoid people by crossing the sodden meadows, in order to save myself from facing them. Confronting the villages I stand ashamed. Confronting the children I change my face to look like one of the community. (36)

In one of his essays, Paul Auster remarks that to be truly engaged with a novel we have to feel the author was compelled to write it. The writer had no choice other than to write it. So it is with Herzog’s walk. He cannot wait until spring. He cannot plan a route. He does not even have a map when he leaves. He is gripped by compulsion. A compulsion powerful enough to reach from the page and grip the reader too.

Border apple tree on The Map of Encounters 1.0.

By the last week Herzog’s loneliness aches harder than his feet. Of Walking in Ice’s theme of loneliness is a direct result of travelling in winter. Nature will keep you very good company in the summer, but in winter it shrugs you off. On 28 September 2007 I wrote a blog entry about finding an apple tree on the Border, green and fully loaded with fruit. “The tree’s limbs loll invitingly,” I wrote. Herzog’s meeting with an apple tree is very different. It says something of the difficulties that he faced and that I avoided. But I am not congratulating myself. I envy the stridency of Herzog’s journey.

Apples lie rotting in the wet clay soil around the trees, nobody is harvesting them. On one of the trees, which seemed from afar like the only tree left with any leaves, apples in mysterious cluster hang close to one another. There isn’t a single leaf on the wet tree, just wet apples refusing to fall. I picked one, it tasted pretty sour, but the juice in it quenched my thirst. I threw the apple core against the tree, and the apples fell like rain. When the apples had becalmed again, restful on the ground, I thought to myself that no one could imagine such human loneliness. (72)

Stones of Ulster

2009-02-16T21:41:00.016Z

The Ulster Historical Foundation’s graveyard database is an interesting find. It is called History from Headstones. Whatever urge has us wandering into old graveyards and reading headstones can now be indulged online. The website is for researchers and the generally interested. You can browse via theme. For example, I selected ‘Geographical’ then narrowed the enquiry to ‘Honduras’ (a former home of mine). Two gravestones in Northern Ireland mention the Central American country. The texts are presented in a graveside manner:

Tombstone in Clifton Street graveyard, in Belfast’s Shankhill, from History from Headstones. This is a highly notable graveyard, a stone-written history of Belfast. Read a BBC article about this graveyard here.

There are maps on the site too. The charted graveyards can be filtered in various ways. With a brief look it seems Catholic, Church of Ireland, and Presbyterian graveyards are fairly evenly spread throughout Northern Ireland, with the exception of Fermanagh’s shortage of Presbyterians.

Coloured dots give the locations of all graveyards in Fermanagh charted by History from Headstones

The four Presbyterian graveyards in Fermanagh

Lately I have been working in the Built Environment Library in the Cathedral Quarter, Belfast. I go there to gather data for The Map of Watchful Architecture. This library is another excellent resource. It has been especially useful for plotting World War II structures. Thank you to all the staff who have helped me. I notice the digital maps I examine there mark famine graves and sites where unbaptised children were buried. In the landscape these sites are usually unmarked, they certainly do not have headstones. So, it is no surprise that History from Headstones does not include these kinds of sites. After death, we may need a stone stood in our stead so not to be forgotten.

But History from Headstones does have the category ‘other.’ This includes Reformed Presbyterian, Non-Subscribing, Moravians, and Quaker. Looking at the maps I wondered if there is any such thing as mixed-denomination graveyards in Northern Ireland. Dr William Roulston, Research Director of the Ulster Historical Foundation, tells me that ‘other’ also includes graveyards of antiquity not associated with any particular denomination now. “For example, graveyards on the site of a former monastery or medieval parish church. Such graveyards can be considered mixed-denomination in the sense that persons of all religious backgrounds lie buried together. There would be around three hundred such graveyards in Northern Ireland.”

It is too bad the database does not extend beyond Northern Ireland into the rest of Ulster. Of course the limitation is understandable, the creators of the database had to stop somewhere. Also, assuming they used some pre-existing information, surveys from both sides of the Border are not always compatible. This is something I am discovering as I continue compiling The Map of Watchful Architecture. Alas, the Built Heritage Library does not have a direct southern equivalent. I bet there were World War II pillboxes built in the southern Border counties too, but this information is not easily accessible.

I will have to keep digging.

Links: The Northern Ireland Environment Agency: Built Environment and the Ulster Historical Foundation's History from Headstones.

Points of control and observation

2009-02-09T23:31:00.009Z

Here are the military Border structures built and manned during Operation Banner. I have divided them into watchtowers and checkpoints although, as discussed below (20 January), it is not a clear distinction to me. In addition, I use the term ‘checkpoint’ for a fort built by a roadside whereas, as a Newryman told me lately, 'checkpoint' commonly meant any stretch of road the army chose to occupy for a few hours. To many ‘checkpoints’ were movable points where one was pulled-over and questioned.

Border structures, Operation Banner.

I consider this map part of a work in progress rather than a finished piece. I will not be publishing it beyond this blog. Note that it only marks structures reasonably close to the Border, nor does it include RUC stations that may have also housed soldiers.

A Map of Ulster Literature

2009-02-06T12:40:00.007Z

I keep a Word document of literary quotes and excerpts that refer to parts of Ulster. This is for a map of Ulster Literature that I would like to create. Right now I am too busy with maps of the Border to give serious time to it but I hope to some day. Oh, for the time to do everything! I should probably be thankful that the shortness of life is my major stress-factor. Imagine finding life too long.

Modern Irish Literature, Edwards/Bromage. Click through for a closer look.

This is a map of literature from An Atlas of Irish History, published in 1973. Knowing the year is important to explain some notable absences. By now Patrick McCabe has put a Monaghan on the map different, although related, to Kavanagh’s. McCabe has drawn for us an Irish frontier region with its own kind of cowboys and own kind of desperation. McGahern has shown us Leitrim, the life in the houses and in the hedgerows. Then there is a certain Seamus Heaney. By 1973 he already had a few collections published but not yet enough to mark Co. Derry. We were still in the era BH.

Does anybody have any suggestions for Fermanagh? And what about rural Antrim?

I grew up in Donegal. At first I was surprised to find no name on Donegal but having thought about it I still have no good suggestions. Brian Friel, from Tyrone, certainly comes closest with his Ballybeg plays. Perhaps if I was not from the Atlantic coast, and was a decade older, I would be happy saying Friel shows us Donegal. Instead I can’t quite admit it. Donegal is a place more written on than written from. Nobody seems to have captured the modern county so well as to have created a full image or construct of the place, and sent it out into the world.

Some day I intend remapping Donegal. Some day …

The Far Side of the World

2009-02-03T21:51:00.009Z

The matrix of coordinates and vectors supporting Google Maps can be used in many ways. For example, ordinary citizens are becoming amateur Intelligence Officers, spending their evenings scanning the remote regions of foreign nations. Military installations in China have been exposed in this way. Or programmers go into the source code and create mashups, applications that blend the power of Google Maps with an independent idea. At http://map.talleye.com/bighole.php is one such creation. It shows where you would emerge if you dug into the ground beneath your feet and never stopped. Or, to put it another way, it identifies the opposite side of the earth from any given point. So, if I was to pickaxe through the concrete floor of my studio in Belfast and then start digging straight downward I would eventually appear …

En un mondo Absolut

2009-01-23T23:01:00.016Z

The Los Angles Times has been reporting on a Mexican billboard and press campaign for Absolut Vodka. It is a map depicting what the Americas might look like in an Absolut, that is to say dream, world. It is ruffling feathers in the United States among people who don’t like seeing their borders messed with. One offended commenter wondered what the Irish would make of a British Absolut ad campaign showing the Republic of Ireland reclaimed. I do not think he is making a fair comparison. A better comparison with the Mexican campaign would be an Irish Absolut ad showing Britain annexed to Ireland. A ridiculous notion, therefore crude but harmless.

But perhaps some people in the United States do not feel the map is so ridiculous and, therefore, not funny. Hence the offence. Another commentator says of the map:

This is Mexico’s goal. Flood the country with illegals, get them the right to vote, and then vote in their people. And it’s slowly becoming a reality.

On a discussion board elsewhere I came across a rather crudely rendered reply to Absolute’s campaign. This is a section only:

Someone, not me, might write a thesis on the implications of the Absolut advert. I shall limit myself to one more observation only: Despite the frontier-pushing nationalism exhibited in this ad it is notable that the main slogan is in the English language.

Watchtower or Checkpoint

2009-01-20T00:27:00.010Z

A section of the work in progress, The Map of Watchful Architecture.

I am busy plotting the locations of defensive architecture. There are many hundreds of raths (ringforts) along the Border and I do not wish to display them all. One way of cutting back is to only display raths in a narrow Border corridor, one hundred metres for example. But then what to do with uncommon features I do not wish to cut, that fall beyond that confine? For example, there are only about thirty military installations from the recent deployment to display. I would like to display all of them. Is it justifiable to have one rule for raths and another rule for checkpoints and watchtowers? Should I mechanically chart everything evenly, thereby creating a map awash with raths? Or think more aesthetically?

In the design of the Map of Watchful Architecture I seek a middle ground between cartographical accuracy, visual appeal, meaning, and integrity.

I am pretty sure two categories on the map will be ‘Towers’ and ‘Checkpoints.’ Today I went through the coordinates of the 30 recent military installations to define each as either one or the other. I did this by simply looking at its location on a detailed map. If the feature was on a hilltop with no roads nearby then it was clearly a watchtower. If it was right next to a road then it was a checkpoint. However, I found two that seemed to fall between both possibilities. I include the maps here as you never know, one of this blog’s readers might be able to tell me. They are both in Fermanagh, close to roads but not quite on them, and only slightly elevated. Watchtowers or checkpoints?

One and ...

two.

This has me wondering; what was the difference between a tower and a checkpoint anyway? They were both built tall and both bristled with surveillance technology. But did the almost sculptural presence of high watchtowers, over-lording, uncontactable, mean they deserve their own distinct place on the map? By contrast the checkpoints always seemed more ordinary. You saw the men inside. They came out and spoke to you sometimes.

South Armagh had eleven installations. Looking at their locations the danger of deployment in that area is stark. Only one out of the eleven was a roadside checkpoint. The rest were on the peaks of mountains. In South Armagh the army had to stay off low ground, or at least not be on it for long, preferably by using a helicopter. The army’s mission there was containment. The towers seem to have made a net, strung between high points.

On Drumlins

2009-01-14T16:39:00.015Z

In an earlier entry I promised words about drumlins. The name may come from the Irish droimnín: a little hill ridge. These hills are a lot more common in the north than the south of Ireland and give parts of the North a very distinct look. They are made of layers of loose rock worked by the massive and patient attentions of glaciers or shifting waters, rather like the hard ripples left on a beach at low-tide. They tend to be oval in shape and come in batches, their long axis running parallel and their blunter ends facing into the glacial movement. I have read it described as a “basket of eggs topography.” On a Border walk near Aughnacloy I encountered one perfect example, a smooth green egg lying sideways in the land, fifty metres tall.

Strangford Lough

There are plenty of drumlins in County Down. Those islands in Strangford Lough, they’re drumlins. I read drumlins are common in New York State and Wisconsin, Poland, Estonia, Finland, and Patagonia. The formation of brand new drumlins was observed for the first time in Antarctica not too long ago. (See BBC news: news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/sci/tech/6295395.stm)

Recently Kevin Myers alighted on drumlins in his book Watching the Door, a memoir of his time as a journalist in Belfast during the Troubles. Rather than the above explanation he reckons the word comes from droim, Irish for ridge and lin from the English ling meaning; being like. This sets him thinking of the drumlin landscape as being a place where Irish and English meet, or rather clash. Myers associates the drumlin landscape with an unconquerability, a unsmoothable division between Anglo and Irish. The basket of eggs topography is a landscape for harrying, hiding, smuggling, and struggling. A landscape for guerrilla wars that can never be won but never quite lost and a good base for the myth-writing that support them: “this miserable hallucination of the drumlin, whose myths conjured poison from the soil …”

Myers uses the drumlins as a stand in for the Border. When his time as a journalist in Belfast is over he goes south to Dublin and gets “clear of the drumlins and their malignity.”

Estyn Evans, Geographer and founder of Queen's school of Geography, used to wax lyrical about the drumlins. He used them to highlight the diversity of Ireland’s land and people. He suggested the landscape of valleys and shadows the drumlins created is bonded to a local culture. A place of “limited vision and imagination. I always like to contrast that kind of hidden landscape [ ... ] with the open naked bogs and hills which are naturally areas of vision and imagination.”

I do not agree with Evans’ categorisations although I cannot help but think there is much potency in a landscape to shape culture. Evan’s falls in with the old Western/Instinctual/Catholic and the Eastern/Acquired/Protestant duality. It is hard to tell who is more hard-done by these stereotypes. But nonetheless Evans’ view of the drumlins is more useful. And after decades of conflict we need useful now. Myers uses the drumlins as a simple symbol for oppressive times and as backdrop to his tall tales. Evans, as a geographer, uses the drumlins as markers of a regionally diverse Ireland. A land of as many peoples are there are terrains. This is a point worth making and showing us the northern drumlins is his way of doing it.

Freedom of Information Act

2008-12-21T00:20:00.018Z

Image: Donovan Wylie. Tower Golf 40, south Armagh, west view. Wylie is represented by Magnum. www.magnumphotos.com

I went to the Ministry of Defence and requested the exact locations of British Military structures along the Border in the last thirty years. These will be just one of the defensive features marked on the Map of Watchful Architecture. I put in my request under the Freedom of Information Act. This was an act of parliament that introduced a public ‘right to know’ in relation to public bodies. It was a Labour Party commitment in 1997’s general election and came into force in 2005. Their manifesto said: "We are pledged to a Freedom of Information Act, leading to more open government."

Under the terms of the Act I had to be given the information within 20 days. I was.

The reply letter, that came with the spreadsheet of grid locations, was very politely worded. I was thanked for my request, they were “pleased to enclose” the information, and I was told how to complain if I am dissatisfied. It feels very New Labour all right. Searching around online I see that a criticism of the Act is that its range of exemptions is uncommonly wide, compared with other democracies, and there is a ministerial veto that can undermine the Act any time.

However, I’m not going to be too critical now. The existence of a one-stop Act for all your information requests is a very useful facility. Even if your requested is refused you will know why. That at least means you will be in direct debate with the public body and not just in a Kafkaesque process of being sent on to some other office and never getting anywhere. The Freedom of Information Act is democracy at work.

Next: I want to find out where the Republic of Ireland’s police force perform checks for illegal immigration from the UK. I know it happens on the motorway between Belfast and Dublin. Often when I take a bus south we are pulled over and all the passengers checked. But does it happen on other Border roads? And if so, which?

Break and reset

2008-12-15T17:20:00.012Z

Some of the most arbitrary borders in the world are in the Middle East. They were often laid down by Europeans for their own interests. The borders of the Middle East, as Winston Churchill said, generate more trouble than can be consumed locally. Colonel Ralph Peters of the US Army has written a book called Adventures in a Broken World. In one section he proposes a redrawn Middle East. He creates territories he believes would be more successful and peaceful as neighbours.

The Middle East now

Peters' proposal (click through for a closer look)

Some notable features of the map/proposal are; Pakistan grows, Iran reshapes into a roughly Persian formation, Israel returns to its 1967 borders, Iraq is broken up, and a Free Kurdistan is created. On the Kurds Peters writes:

The most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust lands between the Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence of an independent Kurdish state. There are between 27 million and 36 million Kurds living in contiguous regions in the Middle East (the figures are imprecise because no state has ever allowed an honest census). Greater than the population of present-day Iraq, even the lower figure makes the Kurds the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of its own. Worse, Kurds have been oppressed by every government controlling the hills and mountains where they’ve lived since Xenophon’s day. The U.S. and its coalition partners missed a glorious chance to begin to correct this injustice after Baghdad’s fall. A Frankenstein’s monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts, Iraq should have been divided into three smaller states immediately. We failed from cowardice and lack of vision, bullying Iraq’s Kurds into supporting the new Iraqi government — which they do wistfully as a quid pro quo for our good will. But were a free plebiscite to be held, make no mistake: Nearly 100 percent of Iraq’s Kurds would vote for independence.

Peters is equally confident that most of the Muslim world would be glad to see Mecca and Medina taken from the Saudis. He writes that Saudi Arabia’s possession of Islam’s holiest shrines has given them a vast and misused power to direct the nature of the faith. “The Saudis have been able to project their Wahhabi vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far beyond their borders,” he writes. He proposes the creation of an Islamic Sacred State. It can be seen on the map. He envisions it as a kind of Muslim Vatican, ruled by a rotating council. A place where the future of a great faith could be debated not merely decreed.

Peters is sniffy about foreigners drawing the Middle East’s boundaries without seeming to realise that his proposals puts him firmly in their linage. For example an ultimate aim of the creation of his “Islamic Scared State” is to reduce potential attacks on the United States. This is a reasonable ambition, especially as it would almost certainly reflect a fairer Middle East. However, it is still drawing borders in the Middle East for the benefit of distant peoples. There is no getting away from that fact.

Ultimately the Middle East will have to sort itself out. With the support of the rest of the world, certainly, but it is worth reflecting that, by and large, their struggles are internal. Muslim extremists mainly kill other Muslims, not New Yorkers or Londoners. This is not to suggest the rest of the world should leave them too it. But we see the Middle East as a foreign policy problem whereas to the Middle Easterners it is local. This means, by definition, their solutions will be more robust. The best thing we can do is facilitate their dialogue.

Northern Ireland knows about this. The Peace Process was made possible and pushed along by the interventions of the Dublin, London, and Washington. But mainly the Peace Process was a local ground swell. It still is. As the time of the writing the Stormont Assembly (Northern Ireland’s local government) is only starting to meet again after four months of not speaking to each other. Such deadlocks are common here as we have a government which is both incumbent and opposition rolled into one. A deeply conflicted assembly that shivers with indecision. During the last four months Northern Ireland did not sink into warfare. The people on the street just got on with evolving their Peace Process, as they have been for ten years. They required no higher leadership to do so. Why should they? The people of Northern Ireland know the Peace Process is theirs. They own it.

The Last Watchtower not in Northern Ireland

2008-11-25T23:34:00.008Z

I am charting the former locations of military checkpoints along the Border for The Map of Watchful Architecture. I went on to the Ministry of Defence website to seek the co-coordinates of these facilities. I used the Freedom of Information Act to request the information. I also asked for the former locations of military watchtowers, several were built on hilltops during the last deployment. Watchtowers that were reasonably close to the Border will also go on the map. There was a concentration of them in South Armagh but over the last few years all these towers have been dismantled.

While on the MOD website I discovered the demolition of one watchtower that did not make it into Northern Irish newspapers, a tower in England that was used for training soldiers soon to be deployed here. These English towers were put up in the 1970s. They simulated the conditions soldiers went on to experience. The final training tower was pulled down at Stanta Training Area in Norfolk on 6 February 2008.

A retired Lieutenant Colonel, who served with the first resident battalion in Londonderry in 1970 was there and was quoted:

These towers were built to simulate the conditions that soldiers met in the Northern Ireland campaign and enabled the soldier to received the training they needed. It was a very restrictive and confined space with up to 20 soldiers in each of the towers. Their key responsibility was observation but there were risks as well as you never knew when a sniper attack might come. This is a very important full stop at the end of a very long and significant campaign for the British military in Northern Ireland.

Meanings in the Underground Map

2008-11-18T22:24:00.009Z

I have always admired the London Underground map. It is hard to measure the extent of its influence on the Map of Connections, but it is a lot. I am far from the only designer drawn to its effectiveness. It is a classic of modern design, by now iconic. The abstract leap this design makes is from the geographical to the topographical. The latitude and longitude of each station is ignored. What matters is how the stations connect.

Let’s unpack: Bearing in mind that, as Denis Wood termed it, “maps work by serving interests” what interest can we find served here? One consistent complaint it that, released from the moorings of the actual landscape, this map makes parts of Greater London seem closer when they are, in fact, far flung. With this comes the related fact that the map spreads out the city centre and shrinks the suburbs. There might be only a hundred addresses lying between two city centre stations but one hundred thousand between outlying stations. Does the map undervalue suburbanites?

The official tube map also implies that the system is spread out evenly in all directions. Looking recently at a geographically correct version of the London Underground (image below) I see that the central north-east is conspicuously lacking attention from the London Underground.

Visit this link; www.diagrams.org/images/png/large/f00023.html, for a closer look at this interesting version of the tube map.

I do not know London well enough to say why this might be. Most of my experience of underground navigations comes not from London but from Paris. The Metro map uses the same diagrammatic method of information display. I have some family there and have visited Paris often, starting in my early teens. It was there, off exploring, that I first felt the strange disjunction of going underground in one cityscape and emerging in a completely different one. Such as going under by the greenery and park railings of Tuileries and coming up again in the cold expanses and gleaming verticals of La Défense. Something of this city-wide collage excited me then and still does. The Metro map told me I could go anywhere and I did. Not all maps do so. Bordered maps for example imply impediment, even if it is not actually there on the ground. Borderlines are the target of The Map of Connections.

The London Underground Map also says you can go anywhere. This is the ultimate interest it serves. It encourages free-flowing interconnection. It is a democratic map that opens up London and contributes to its economic vibrancy. As such it is a great success. Complaints against it, such as those raised above, are born of reading the map out of context. It is really only meant to be viewed in stations or on the trains themselves. It is not the map’s fault it became an icon. The London Underground map should not be consulted when judging the relative values of suburb and centre. Or calculating how long it would take you to walk to Epping. If you are not in the Underground when you are reading it then it does not, in any sense, tell you where you are. Only where you could be.

From the Comments Book

2008-10-27T21:27:00.013Z

The exhibition of the Map of Connections 2.0 and the Map of Encounters 1.0 is now over. A few days ago I went in and painted over the maps with a few coats of white emulsion. Thank you to everyone who visited.

Below, some remarks from the comments book followed by my replies:

“Makes you think different about Ireland and Northern Ireland,” Christopher.
“Some very interesting observations with attractive patterns emerging,” Helen.
“[ … ] place names on the photos would have been informative. Desmond.
“[ … ] Love to hear more about ‘unfriendly’ encounters and where the border gets lost,” Dan.
“Nice work, would love an excuse to explore Ireland this way, [ … ]” Miriam.
“Super duper,” Laura.

Yes, Miriam, I suggest you find that excuse. I suppose it is a part and privilege of artistic practice to go to places people normally do not. Nobody really visits the Border and that might be reason enough to go. Moreover, sections go through memorable country. The bogland north of Lough Derg and around Cuilcagh Mountain had a particular desolate beauty.

Dan, you raise a good point. I did include the vandalism of my car on The Map of Encounters but that is the only negative featured. (The stone pinned to the image, by the way, is the actual stone thrown. Not a stand in stone.) I went on my walks in a generally positive frame of mind and I suspect I was more alive to friendly, or natural, encounters. If I was not in a positive state of mind I probably would have gone home. I attempted to travel wide-eyed, as if seeing everything for the first time. This maybe preserved in the innocent atmosphere of the Map of Encounters. I feel both The Map of Encounters and The Map of Connections are attempts at a progressive, inclusive, and some how optimistic, cartography.

As for the Border getting lost, I am not sure it does. Although I certain got lost from it a few times. Several times I realised that, after half an hour, I was following the wrong hedgerow or ditch.

Desmond, your suggestion of adding place names to Map of Connections is something I am considering. Not to the photographs but perhaps to the map itself. I do want people to be able to engage with the map rapidly and not just find it puzzling. I like it that Helen found “attractive patterns emerging” but if that is the only level the work reached viewers then I may need to add traditional and ready-readable cartographical signs.

Thank you to everyone who commented.

Reading the Peutinger Map

2008-10-24T00:27:00.014+01:00

Richard Talbert of the University of North Carolina opened his lecture at Queen’s by displaying a full size scan of the Peutinger Map. It was in parts. I was one of the volunteers who stood in a row and held up two-foot laminated sections so everyone could get a sense of its length. The map is twenty-foot long and one foot tall. It is believed to be a twelfth or thirteenth century copy of a Roman original. It shows the Roman world as far east as India and it would have included more of Britain and perhaps Ireland too if the map were not missing a few feet on the western end. The original must have been drawn after 328. Constantinople is marked and it was founded in that year. But it also shows Pompeii, which was buried in ash in 79. So, the map was not up to date. Or perhaps its creator had a wider definition of town. Seeing fit to include notable towns of the dead.

The above image is a detail. Rome is symbolised as a Goddess on the bottom right. Roads are shown as red lines. This is a good website for an overview of the map: www.euratlas.net/cartogra/peutinger/

As Talbert pointed out to us it is a road map, an early map of connections. It has an enjoyable leisurely aspect, baths are marked instead of military installations. Talbert said that it must have been surprising to it Roman readers that no borders are marked. I am not so sure about this. It may be surprising to us but how did the Roman mind conceive frontiers? Roman society, we learned, “was highly aware of boundaries.” Yet much of my reading suggests that until recently most borders were wide interface zones. It would have been an abstract leap to begin thinking of these areas as sharp separators. And perhaps a still further leap to create the sign of the borderline to denote it. The Emperor Hadrian’s famous wall (image below), I concede, shows a Roman ability to consolidate frontiers in narrow widths. But didn’t Roman control actually roll beyond the wall and diffuse over miles? Did the Roman’s not trade with the Picts? Was the wall just as much a symbol of Roman values as a defensive structure?

Even if not, the borderline as a cartographical device is still something that had to be, at some point, invented. Marking a border on a map would be the act of will, not not marking it. Before the Peutinger’s exemplar maps did not even indicate roads.

I wonder if the marking of Roman baths wasn’t a powerful enough indication of possession on the original map? Any place with a baths or other Roman structure was within the pale. Baths were not pure leisure after all, but a statement of civilization. The baths icon might have been border enough for the meaning of this map. No matter your far-flung location, no matter your language, access to baths made you Roman.

This section shows a baths in what is now Belgium.

A detail of the Gough Map, a British Map also showing roads. It was produced around 1360, read about it here: www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/users/nnj/goughmap.htm. The Gough Map happens to be the topic of a Queen’s based research project: www.qub.ac.uk/urban_mapping/gough_map/.

Later in the lecture Richard Talbert stuck his neck out, suggesting a Roman imperial structure in Croatia, behind the throne area, as a site where the Roman exemplar would have been a nice fit. He also cites it as a potential influence on the Gough Map of Britain. This is convincing. The Gough Map marks roads (it has been called Britain’s first road map), uses house icons to denote towns, and gives the distances between them. These are all elements of the Peutinger Map. Talbert believes the Peutinger Map made a formative contribution to cartography which has not been noted and “deserves long overdue recognition [ … ] The Peutinger Map is much more than just a road guide.”

Belfast Exhibition

2008-10-11T17:34:00.012+01:00

If you’re in Belfast in the next couple of weeks you can see, painted on the walls of PS squared, two of my maps. We had an opening night on Thursday and I hope everybody had a good time. Instead of fancy finger food I prepared samples of my typical Border trekking provisions: mackerel sandwiches, cheap bourbon creams, and bananas. “There’s great energy in a banana,” an Armagh farmer said to me, while handing me a banana. The above photograph was taken from out on the street during the opening.

I painted the maps directly on the walls of the space. Please click through for a closer look. The Map of Connections 2.0:

The Map of Encounters 1.0:

Thank you to Peter, the curator of the space, for giving PS squared over to my work and for all his advice and encouragement.

PS squared, 18 Donegall Street, Belfast. Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 1 – 5pm. 14 – 16 October, 1 – 9pm. 18 October, 10am – 6pm.

Drawing Encounters

2008-09-29T13:24:00.008+01:00

I will be showing The Map of Connections 2.0 and The Map of Encounters 1.0 in PS squared, Donegall Street, Belfast. The show opens on the 9th of October. I will be going in four days in advance to paint these versions of the maps on opposite walls of the gallery space. The Map of Connections is a strict diagram already laid-out and ready to be projected. The Map of Encounters is still in development and will probably continue to be so until just before the show opens. It has plenty of potential content, photographs, notes, my equipment, and the occasional souvenir. Peter, the curator of the space, is encouraging me to go in and let the creation of the map flow in a loose and instinctual way. That is not easy for me, loose is not my style, but I can see it may be a beneficial process.

In the last few days I have been producing images for The Map of Encounters. These are two examples. The farmer’s land abutted the most southern point of Northern Ireland. He pointed it out to me. Further west I was excited to see the buzzard, south of Slieve Beagh, as they are uncommon in Ireland.

Performing the Border

2008-09-16T12:37:00.017+01:00

Ursula Biemann’s 43 minute film Performing the Border is something between artist’s discourse and documentary. It is about the Mexico/US Border. Around Ciudad Juarez, just inside Mexico, large companies have installed production plants to get advantage of cheaper labour. The factories are called maquiladoras and are spread across desert, a place without water. “Here you cannot draw anything from the environment,” says one interviewee. “Here you have to make.” Thousands moved in to work the maquiladoras, especially women. In Mexico, companies can still create positions and advertise gender specifically. The film looks at the sexualisation of the border region through labour division, the factory-women’s usually high spending power, prostitution, and the rates of sexual violence.

In her dissection of this new geography Biemann says the borderline was transformed into a mechanised and dehumanized zone in this industrialisation process: “In short a new technological culture of repetition, registration and controlling was introduced to this desert city.” She makes daring links, suggesting this production-line town, where every job is a small one, a tiny part of an unknown whole, is dehumanizing even to the extent of attracting serial killers. “He (the killer) is perpetually in search of a border. He is attracted by the border of his country precisely because it signifies the boundary of a larger entity of belonging, the nation. Going to the border becomes the physical expression of his mental extremity.”

Regarding that last quoted point, I believe there are more frank and frankly political reasons why victimization can be found concentrated along the Mexican border with the US. Most countries push their unwanted toward the edge and a country’s unwanted are easy victims. However I do think it is rewarding to think on certain subjects in these kind of instinctive ways, borders included, and the linkages Biemann draws are powerful and persuasive.

Searching around the internet I see Ciudad Juarez is highly ranked as a place to do business among corporations north of the border while, on the other side of the coin, over 400 women have been murdered there since 1993. Most of the murders have gone unsolved. According to the Organization of American States' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights:

The victims of these crimes have preponderantly been young women, between 12 and 22 years of age. Many were students, and most were maquiladora workers. A number were relative newcomers to Ciudad Juarez who had migrated from other areas of Mexico. The victims were generally reported missing by their families, with their bodies found days or months later abandoned in vacant lots or outlying areas.
(Full report: www.cidh.org/annualrep/2002eng/chap.vi.juarez.htm)

The opening minutes of Ursula Biemann’s Performing the Border can be seen on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=15urJPX663U

See this part of the border from the corporate point of view: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRuY3dww6Gk

The artist’s website: www.geobodies.org

Quinn Land

2008-09-02T21:09:00.010+01:00

“It’s an ugly place, all the trees are covered in grey dust.” These are the words of a Fermanagh woman I meet. She is speaking about the territory of the Mighty Quinn, local business living-legend. “But,” she adds, “I have to admit, he has half the county employed.”

Follow the road south to Ballyconnell and you pass through his empire. Vast sheds contain a family of industries. Quinn Radiators, Quinn Packaging, Quinn Cement, Quinn This, Quinn That ... My car happens to be covered by Quinn insurance. Leave it parked near his works and, sure enough, it will soon be covered in Quinn dust. Between the smoking and churning factories the Border pushes through and on up Slieve Rushen. For Quinn does not just have half of Fermanagh employed but half of Cavan too. His empire is both sides of the Border. I walk up a Border-hugging lane, the tallest stacks of the Quinn cement factory always in view. The lane turns and so to stick to the Border I go off-lane through the trees. I come across ruined cottages, not an unusual sight anywhere in Ireland but here somehow strange with the massive machines rumbling nearby. Pushing on I begin to hear a regular beep-beep from somewhere up ahead. It is the warning sound produced by a truck in reverse. Where can it be coming from? I am half way up a steep mountain and there is no road near according to my map. I push through more undergrowth and a suddenly a great hole in the world opens up beneath me. Quinn’s quarry.

Looking down over the edge the reversing truck is the size of dinky toy on the palm of your outstretched hand. The quarry is a truly enormous scoop out of Slieve Rushen. It is amazing that it cannot be seen from the main road, although perhaps this is because Quinn is obligated to keep it so. The Ordnance Survey has a symbol for quarries, a kind of one-size-fits-all rippled bite, but it is completely inadequate to describe this pit. Quinn’s quarry has profoundly altered the contours of Slieve Rushen. Why not redraw the map contours to show its presence? I wonder if the Survey wait until a quarry is disused before mapping it.

Over the crest of Slieve Rushen is a wind farm. I can see the turbines churning out energy from where I stand. The top of the turbines are hidden by grey clouds. From the edge of this great hole the wind turbines seem even more aspirational than they usually do. Compared to the digging out the accessible, but dirty, wealth directly beneath our feet trying to farm it cleanly out of the air seems doomed to be a minority interest. Think of the investment it took to move half this mountain. It is moving still. On every road around here a Quinn lorry is constantly rolling by. Standing beside such a huge project the turbines really do seem to have their heads in the clouds.

I walk around the quarry and on up the mountain. The Border passes between the turbines and I go to investigate them. It turns out the wind farm belongs to Quinn as well.

In Rosslea

2008-08-31T21:09:00.002+01:00

You can tell you’re in a Nationalist town when the bottle recycling units are arranged to evoke the Irish Republic’s flag.

Disused and dismantled

2008-08-14T17:50:00.007+01:00

Yesterday was a day of disused and dismantled. I followed the Border south of Clones where it makes a mad loop back on itself. The result is a peninsula of the Republic sticking into the North. Its neck is only one hundred metres wide but from there it balloons out into an area twelve kilometres square. It was to even out just such twists that the Border commission was formed after partition. And no doubt they recommended the snipping of this particular headland. However, in the end, the commission’s suggestions were not acted upon.

A disused canel runs across this area. For a short while it constitutes the Border. I walk along it. I pass an abandoned warehouse with a large upper loading bay standing over the route. It will be waiting a long time for the next barge. What would it take to reflood this route? Or the others to east it could link to, such as the old Ulster Canal. The canal route I walked leads to Upper Lough Erne, and once you are there the west is your oyster.

I have walked a fair few dismantled railways toward their Border crossing points. In every case, so far, the Border has been a river along the area in question. So, I was checking to see if the bridge that once carried trains is still standing and now perhaps carrying foot-traffic. They never have been. The connection has always been broken. Either the girders have been exploded, as was the case with the Belcoo example from the July 27th entry, or its brickwork has been dismantled, leaving two stubby structures looking forlornly at each other across eight or ten metres of empty air. This dismantled railway bridge is the exception (44855, 19259).

I confess that strictly speaking this structure should not go on The Map of Connections. The growth on the southern side is too thick to easily walk through. But I cannot resist counting it as a connection. It is a rare exception I am making. I assure you this is not going to initiate slack standards. I cannot resist for one simple reason. It is beautiful.

At Forfey

2008-08-14T17:45:00.003+01:00

This photo is a couple of Lisnakea locals examining the photographs of cross border connections, at the Forfey Festival recently. The photographs accompanied the first large scale draft of the map itself. It was a festival of music and arts. I relaxed around the campsite a lot, reading The Crossing, the second of Cormac Mc Carthy’s Border Trilogy.

The Forfey Festival

2008-08-03T22:53:00.007+01:00

The first draft of the Map of Connections will be on shown at the Forfey Festival this weekend. I will be talking about my work on the Saturday. Swing by, if you happen to be in the neighbourhood of Lisnaskea, County Fermanagh.

The festival's website is: www.forfeyfestival.co.uk.

On Cuilcagh

2008-07-29T17:33:00.007+01:00

Here and there the boggy coating of Cuilcagh Mountain is worn open and you can see that the whole thing is based on slabs of rock, cracking and parting in clean lines. Approaching the peak from the east I follow the Border as it follows a stream. In one place the stream reveals the regularity of the mountain’s foundations.

Above begins miles of blanket bog. At one point I stop and turn a slow 360. Not a road, not a sheep, not a tree, as far as my eye can see. No other walkers either. Within Ireland, this might be the furthest I have ever been from human life.

Cuilcagh is pronounced cull-kaa or quill-kaa, depending who you hear it from. The peak of Cuilcagh is the highest point of the Border, 666 metres, but this is not a peak-defined mountain. It is a long ridge bristling with rocks, well suited to having a border pinned along it. The eastern tip is like the bow of a capsized boat. On the steep eastern face long patches of loose rock are exposed. The soil has been washed away, if it ever had purchase there in the first place. The rocks are the same neat slabs seen in the foothills but here they are small, jumbled, and loose. From a distance these stony patches look like huge letters, grey on green, from an unknown alphabet. They spell out a gigantic but unreadable word.

I will have to return to Cuilcagh. I am not sure what to make of it.

Broken Connection

2008-07-27T00:25:00.006+01:00

The Ordnance Survey shows a disused railway line running by the village of Belcoo and across the river into the South (H 07700, H 38300). I went in search of the tracks because there was surely a chance the railway bridge would still be standing. It would no longer be carrying trains of course, but walkers might be using it. The tracks were gone but the embankment they once ran on was easy to discern. I walked it across the fields to the riverbank. The collapsed bridge is a broken connection.

Mysterious Connection

2008-07-09T15:46:00.006+01:00

Near Lough Melvin is a mysterious connection crossing the Border as it follows a wide river (N. 195547, E. 348176). It is structural sound, built of steel on concrete foundations, but is in the middle of nowhere. No proper paths lead to it from either side of the Border. Solidly bolted together but isolated, the bridge felt like something those island survivors in the television series Lost would come across. It is hard to see how the builders even brought the materials to the site.

My guesses are that it was used for cattle smuggling, which might explain its high-sides, and that it was built before the Fir plantation on the southern side was even planted. Now the bridge seems forgotten but is so well built it will probably continue to be occasionally used for a hundred years.

William Bunge

2008-06-22T11:21:00.007+01:00

Often I get an interlibrary loan via Queen’s University Library. To do so I have to go to the geography building and get an interlibrary loan voucher to present with my request. It is always one voucher per book. So I knew I was in for something rarefied when I was told that getting a look at William Bunge’s Field Notes: The Detroit Geographical Expedition was going to cost me seven vouchers.

It arrived. About thirty brown typewritten pages in a cardboard folder. It is from 1967. It describes the Bunge leading his students in expeditions into the, largely African America, slums of Detroit but it is also a manifesto for his geography. He argues that the exploration must be but back in geography. We must hit the road. The world must be constantly rediscovered. Hence his setting of to explore Detroit slums as if they were uncharted jungle. But of course to many of his students that was exactly what they were. Perhaps even scarier than uncharted jungle. Those were volatile times in America race relations. Bunge places great importance on talking and listening to the people one meets during explorations. In a nice insight he names cabdrivers as the modern version of the native guides leading famous old-school explorers across the Americas or into Africa.

Bunge tells the geographer to get out of their chair and explore. Our survival, literally, depends on it:

Mankind must find himself now, or he will perish from the face of the earth … The exploration facing geographers today is infinity more vital than that facing Columbus. Of course, survival is a total human effort. It is silly to ask whether or not our effort will be more important that that of anti-war nuclear physicists, or garbage collectors in Memphis, Tennessee. Everyone must simply do all he can with every nonce of this strength until such time as man has ceased to be his own “natural” enemy. No task is more “practical-idealistic,” “selfish-unselfish,” “materialistic-spiritual.” And finally, there is no argument with this program. Anyone that sees an alternative direction for geography or any other human activity is obviously insane, that is, has lost contact with the world of reality. The tyranny of fact compels that geographers go into a state of rationally controlled frenzy about the exploration of the human condition.

This image is one of Bunge’s other projects; a Nuclear War Atlas. Click through for a closer look.

I enjoy Bunge’s vision of the geographer as tough explorer, travelling light, loving society but at the same time being somewhat outside of it. There will be real risk; “Exploring humans is a meaningful way is fraught with physical danger.” Have I mentioned on the barbed-wire cuts I have been getting on my Border walks? The goats chasing me? The electric fences? I hope Bunge would count these things. Bunge’s hunter/geographer is also unlikely to gain much financial reward from his work. I can identify with his too, but luckily; “geographers are a hardy breed and do not tend to even approach starvation before their reflexes save them.”

Points Without Lines

2008-06-12T13:12:00.003+01:00

I will be publicly showing first drafts of The Map of Connections before the year is out. I am not certain what it will look like yet. A phase of graphical experimentation now begins. The above map is, as you can see, completely abstracted from the land. It shows all the connections I have mapped so far.

Phyllis Pearsall

2008-06-03T00:43:00.008+01:00

I have been reading about the life and work of Phyllis Pearsall. In the 1930s she noticed that London maps were completely inadequate. No surveying had been done in over ten years. So, she started walking, covering all of London’s 23,000 streets in the course of one year. That is about 3000 miles. Her map became the London A-Z. At first no publishers wanted to publish her new map so she set up the Geographer’s Map Company to do it herself.

By now the A-Z has become an exemplar of 20th century information design. One touch I particularly admire is marking house numbers on three points along each street, beginning, middle and end. There would not be enough space to include every house number but three is sufficient to describe the numerical trend of each row. As far as I know Pearsall invented this. Yet Pearsall never saw herself as a designer, but as an artist who drifted in cartography because bad maps were always getting her lost on the way to parties.

Pearsall’s get-up-and-go, grounded methodology, and plentiful eccentricities are enough to qualify her as a hero to my project. She is also an example of how the work of an independent cartographer can be absorbed into the mainstream if deemed useful (Pearsall herself gained an MBE). The A-Z is by now such a cornerstone of British Atlases that many people would probably be surprised to know it all began with an individual woman, walking and taking notes.

Data display

2008-05-25T16:20:00.005+01:00

This latest map is more like the side-effect of data input than an actual indication of how my finished maps will look. However it is a good rough guide to how much of the Border I have travelled so far. Next I am headed for the watery landscape of Fermanagh. The Border goes through a few large lakes in that area. I will be looking to borrow rowboats …

In Barcelona

2008-05-20T23:35:00.005+01:00

A trip to Barcelona a while ago brought me the CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona). It is a cultural centre with about fifty skateboarders permanently out the front using its plaza and modern angles for stunt-making. The exhibition inside was called Borders.

One exhibit was the representation, or perhaps the creation, of the Havana/Miami border. The waterfronts of both cities were traveled and photographed continuously. The photographs were then digitally stitched together to produce long images, about twenty metres long. Then, across a hallway in the CCCB, the two images are set facing each other. The buildings look at each other, as if only across an avenue. A hundred kilometers of water-border is narrowed and made into a fluid street.

Best Rath So Far

2008-05-20T23:23:00.007+01:00

One warm evening recently I camped at what I called in my notes; ‘Best Rath So Far.’ (Location: Ele 135m IH 76486 ITH 33281, Irish Grid.) It was triple ringed and atop a neat drumlin. (I shall have to write an entry about drumlins soon, for the moment suffice to say they are rounded hills particular to the northern half of Ireland). Raths are ancient structures more popularly known as fairy rings. They are circular walls, usually built somewhere with a good view. There are about ten thousand of them across the face of Ireland. They were built during the first millennium, when agriculture was improving and the population increasing. They were built to protect family units from wild grabby neighbours and foreign marauders.

For the Map of Watchful Architecture I visit every rath that is reasonably close to the Border. Now they are often sunk back into the landscape, coated in growth and can be difficult to identify. Not Best Rath So Far though. It was remarkably well-defined, proud, and large. It also contained a souterrain, a low underground passage once used for storage or hiding. I was tempted to crawl in to explore it but I was afraid of getting a badger or fox in my face.

It was not just the souterrain, the size of the rath, or its good condition that made this site Best Rath So Far. It was all the life there. Growing from the walls were a loop of tall beech trees. I have read that Beech trees do well on rocky ground. This might explain why they were happy growing from those walls. There are several dozen clumpy nests decorating their branches. Raven’s. Many ravens were wheeling and squawking overhead. (In general in early May along the Border I saw many ravens. Often in family groups of twenty or more.) Bluebells and primroses were blossoming everywhere. Even to my logical view of things this site was a magical place. How might it have felt during more superstitious times? When these sites were unexplained geometric ripples in the landscape? The attention of the ravens, the ring of trees and the circular form of the earthworks make the site feel like a doorway in the nature of things, a portal.

I left half a carrot outside my tent. In the morning it was gone.

Across the Blackwater

2008-05-10T21:43:00.009+01:00

The Map of Connections is a map of unofficial Border crossings. Perhaps the most picturesque I have discovered so far are these substantial stepping stones crossing the Blackwater river. (Location: Ele 32m IH 71092 ITH 47266, Irish Grid) For a section the Blackwater is used as the Border between Tyrone and Monaghan, therefore the Border between northern and southern Ireland. There was no one around to ask about how and when these boulders were placed. It could have been twenty years ago, it was possibly two hundred.

The stepping stones are mere metres from Burn’s Bridge. Why did the locals go to the considerable effort of positioning the boulders with a bridge so near? As mentioned, it is possible the stones predate it. However, compare the worn stones of the arch to the left in the photograph and the smooth new stones of the right arch. I suspect this bridge was blown-up during the Troubles and only rebuilt recently. While this mode of connection was denied to them the locals may have taken things into their own hands. They built their own connection. Now I am happy to map it.

How to claim territory in Palestine

2008-05-08T12:17:00.006+01:00

I read recently about a 02 mobile network mast, serving Israel, constructed illegally on a hilltop in Palestine. Gradually over the months a community of Israeli settlers gathered around it, also illegally. It was as if the mast was a flag, claiming the spot. Now there are trailer homes and shops gathered around it. Using nodal points to claim territories is a subject that interests me and this is an example of its real-world significance. Land, once claimed by a group or interest is very hard to get unclaimed. The mark of that 02 mast maybe felt for decades to come. Yet another reason to democratise the processes of geography, not least of which is cartography.

Chris McGreal wrote in the Guardian, March 10 2005, about an offical report on the government-sponsored process of creating Israeli outposts in Palestine.

The report says that the outposts were often established by subterfuge. One tactic was to build a mobile phone mast, sometimes a fake, on Palestinian land. Next came a guard post to protect the mast followed by a paved road and then mobile homes for the guards to live in. Shortly afterwards settlers moved in. In 2003 alone, the government spent about £5m on providing mobile homes to the outposts.

In the bottom right of the photograph is an example of such a settlement over the border in Palestine.

A problem with borders

2008-03-11T01:09:00.005Z

Poking around on the internet I found this language map a few days ago. When considering the cartographical sign of the border it is interesting to compare a bordered map with a language map. Language, surely a good indication of cultural leaning, almost never shows regard for borders. In fact, in Europe, it is seems that only the border of Iceland, entirely maritime, contains its whole language and no pockets of other languages within.

A harm is exposed here. The tradition linear border sign creates inaccuracy and exclusion. The border claims a homogenous containment of all things inside its lines. This is not the case. Spain, for example, is composed of a highly variable politician terrain yet on a map it is painted one flat colour, edge to edge. Then there is the case of Northern Ireland ...

Many of the languages on the above map represent nations, many others represent counter-nationalisms. Some of the latter are geographically large and coherent enough to regard themselves as proto-nations, the Kurds, the Catalonians. They want borders of their own. If they all got them then would be hundreds of miles of new borders in Europe. These borders would be just as inaccurate and as the borders from which they subdivided themselves. The new border signs would be just as guilty of attempting to even out disparate identities. Further subdivisions might be called for. Then more. Eventually a landscape could be cut back down into what might be the basic building block of nationalism. The family unit. Even there, behind closed doors, might be found divergent tendencies, spite loyalties.

Counter-nationalisms have succeeded. Most recently Kosovo declared its independence. Northern Irish Unionism was also such movement. Labelling Unionism a form of Nationalism may jar with some as within Northern Ireland the notions like to think of themselves as arch-enemies. However in the wider sense of the word Unionism was a nationalist movement. Self-aware, geographically coherent, and seeking self-determination. “However much they might have loathed the idea, Ulster unionists conformed to a pattern of continental European Nationalism” writes Michael Laffan in his history of Irish partition. The Unionists, like the Kosovians, got their new border. On the map, the flat colour filling the space of the new homelands are, of course, a lie. Graphically they would be better described as dappled landscapes of clashing colours. Instead there is one-colour homogeneity inside the border. Serbs in Kosovo get nervous. What is one day overwritten can be erased the next. While the ultimate losers of Irish Independence were the Northern Irish Nationalists, left at the bottom of the pile after two nationalist shifts. On the map they did not have the hint of a border to consol them, no dotted lines, no shaded semi-autonomous patches. Famously, during the 1970s, the citizens of “Free Derry” painted a white line around their territory. It ran across streets and along alleyways and for a time actually framed and created an autonomous zone. The police and army did not cross it. This border was never found on official maps of course, that is the very reason they had to paint it themselves.

What do we hope to gain with all this border creation? Self-determination is the thing. To live in a state that understands you. Your own nation. It may be a crushing hierarchy but at least it is your crushing hierarchy.

At the peak of Holywell Hill

2008-01-23T22:07:00.008Z

In Ireland the sound of desolation is the sound of wind blowing through the gaps in a pylon, sometimes accompanied by the uneven rhythm of a loose cable slapping against the metal infrastructure. You will be exposed. You will be cold.

Near Londonderry tracks make their way to the peak of Holywell hill from both sides of the Border. The Border goes right over the crest. Just in the Northern side is a holy well. A small pool is lined in stones. It is the most lonely and humble pit I have ever seen. Pipes, the leftovers from the engineering work nearby, have been left too close to it. The fence dips and two old stones have been placed to help people step over and visit the well. This is a connection for the Map of Connections. (Ele 264m IC 38535 ITH 17005, Irish Grid)

My first map

2008-01-04T08:18:00.003Z

I use a GPS device to mark my discoveries along the Border. Back at Queen’s University I upload the data from the GPS, convert it with Grid InQuest, and display it cartographically with ArcGIS. Lorraine Barry is the technician in the GIS studio and I must thank her for answering all my damn-fool questions. I have never studied geography and when I decided to re-map the Border I did not even know what the Irish Grid was. As a beginner with the hardware and the software my outputs are basic but I am getting better.

On this scale many of points are lost but my first map does give an idea of how much of the Border I have travelled so far. I have a ways to go yet, I realise. The three types of marking refer to the different maps I am producing. Finished maps will no longer feature the border or county boundaries.

On the power of maps

2007-11-11T10:37:00.007Z

Regarding the power of maps; in recent research Thomas Saarinen gathered over 3,800 sketch maps of the world drawn by children in 49 countries. A composite of the maps by Thai children shows their influences. They produced euro-centric views of the world. Not by just placing Europe in the middle but also enlarging it. Europe is bigger even than the well-known exaggeration induced by the Mercator projection, although it is the ubiquity of that projection that Sarrinen blames for the misperception.

These are interesting results to the post-colonialist but, more broadly, they speak of how maps influence our sense of our place. And how it is not always to our benefit. Maps need to be studied, their salient messages drawn out. “Maps work by serving interests,” remarks map theorist Denis Wood. It is not that maps are mainly neutral documents via which a few lines of propaganda sneak past our defensives. Maps are all propaganda. Remove the vested interest and you are left with a blank sheet. It is right at down at the level of the culture that created them. So, if we are to make new maps we have to go that deep too. And have our own interests to plant there. Cartography without a vested interest is probably impossible.

Tim Robinson

2007-10-10T22:26:00.003+01:00

One inspiration for my project is the West’s Tim Robinson. His maps of Connemara, the Burren and the Aran Islands are ultimately quiet traditional, based very closely on the Ordnance Survey, however they possess a fresh and beguiling human power. His Aran Mór map for example puts a name on virtually every crag and curve on its knobbly south face. These imply the kind of intense detail the islanders have come to known their island and suggest centuries of narrative. They speak of a landscape that is heartfelt by its human element. Loved or perhaps feared, but always known. You would not find these names on any other map. Robinson walks every mile of where he maps, tracing over the Ordnance Survey with updates, new information, and interests previously deemed unimportant by mapmakers. My interests are different but, like him, I will have to see everything with my own eyes. I wrote to him (my first fan letter) and in his reply Robinson advised me; “to do all that's necessary to preserve personal contact with the terrain on the one hand and the sheet of paper on the other.”

The apple tree at the end of the Border

2007-09-28T15:57:00.003+01:00

I have just walked what might be called the beginning or the end of the Border (I travel non-sequential sections). This is the winding way from Jonesborough to Carlingford Lough. Much of Ireland’s border has been pinned to rivers so I am often walking riverbanks. Cows, perhaps related but valued in different currencies, look at each other across narrow waters.

The dusty-purple fruit of the blackthorn are plentiful. Blackthorns are the bricks and mortar of hedgerows in this part of the country. Their berries can be fermented into sloe gin but they are not suited to the immediate needs of the walker. For me to eat are the blackberries. Their thorny shoots emerge from the hedgerows and arc downward as if for my convenience. I throw blackberries in my mouth as I walk. Try to forget the familiarity of these plants and look at them afresh. Then perhaps a clump of Ulster brambles could suggest as much exotic generosity as a coconut palm or an orange tree.

The land border ends at Carlingford Lough and there, rooted right in the border itself, is an apple tree. (Location; Ele 13m IJ 11754 ITH 19475, Irish Grid) It is squeezed into the last few feet of soil, before the border dips into saltwater. This is a real find. Apple trees growing wild are unusual enough but at this location the tree is startling and resonant. A fairy tale kind of landmark, I almost do not want to tell you about it. The tree’s limbs loll invitingly, asking to be relieved of their burden of fruit. I go to their aid.

Unmapped connection and rath

2007-09-19T12:34:00.007+01:00

A steel bridge has helped create a walkers route, ‘the poet’s way.’ (Location; Ele 46m IJ 0123614 ITH 14561, Irish Grid) It is near Forkhill, Co. Armagh. This bridge is the most well-engineered unofficial connection I have found so far. It is not marked on the Ordnance Survey. It leads (on the southern side) to the graveyard of a local 18th century poet, Peadar Ó Doirnín. The chapel was used as a place of worship during penal times.

A local farmer told me about the bridge. He also told me about a rath across the lane from his house. “We used to play in it when we were children,” he said. “We called it the fort.” (Location; Ele 70m IJ 99643 ITH 15177, Irish Grid) There is nothing on the OS map. The undergrowth was so dense I could not confirm the presence of any structure there although I am inclined to take his word for it. Perhaps a look at the Ordnance Survey’s aerial photograph of the area would show a faint ring? I will ask them to let me look the next time I am in. This is often how raths are found. Sometimes, on the ground, you can walk over a rath without seeing it. I wonder if the staff at the Ordnance Survey office here in Belfast are interested in learning the locations of more raths? Their maps aren’t exactly short of them.

Thank you to the farmer for the information, and the porridge breakfast.

An encounter with horses

2007-09-06T07:45:00.000+01:00

Helping distinguish Northern Ireland from the south is the neatness of its farms. The walls and hedgerows are smart, the yards swept, and the grass luscious. This distinct standard of land-care in Northern Ireland has been noted by walkers and writers since the eighteen century. Today one may refer, half-jokingly, to a ‘Protestant-looking field.’ This is a half-joke because within Northern Ireland there is little to distinguish a Protestant farm from a Catholic one. Farm-orderliness may have come over with the Plantations, but by now it is the northern standard.

One day last week I was tramping a series of exemplary Protestant fields (Location: J13700 J01700, Irish Grid), each trimly tailored to the landscape. The hedgerow behind me, tall, correct, impenetrable, is out of sight by the time I arrive at the next, due partly to the undulation of the land but also the great width of the fields. In the centre of each hedgerow is a gate permitting me onward.

I am half way across a yellow field. Its crop of maize has been harvested, cropped short so that the tough stems crunch underfoot. The north gate has been left open and, sudden like an avalanche, horses pour through and gallop toward me. They are shinning, sleek, young and at least a dozen in number. Collective nouns for horses include; ‘a herd,’ ‘a stable,’ ‘a troop,’ but I suggest the addition of ‘a charge,’ ‘a grace,’ ‘a nature.’ A charge because of their gallop, but also because of the electricity they create. A grace because of the way they do so. A nature because, for a moment, they seem to embody it, its pulse and its thoughtlessness.

There is plenty of time to anticipant the horses as they cover the field, it is the size football pitch. There is even time to feel fear, at speed they cross the threshold beyond what seems to be safe-braking distance. At the last moment they lock their knees and halt, forming a circle of curiosity around me. They look at me, I look at them. Magic is real.

Making the Iron Curtain a green zone

2007-09-01T22:47:00.005+01:00

The Iron Curtain was an even more restrictive, inhumane and impoverished borderline in its day than Ireland’s ever was. But now the iron curtain, or rather the line indicating where it once hung, is an example of possible border rehabilitation. Mikhail Gorbachev, now the president of the environmental organization Green Cross International, wants the whole corridor turned into a nature reserve. The opportunity is there, the strip has been largely left to nature and went undeveloped during the cold war. Plans for the park are furthest along in Germany, where the border between East and West Germany stretched for 870 miles. A recent study found that 85 percent of the land is still undeveloped enough to be included in a national park.

National parks along the former Iron Curtain

I wonder if there is a lesson here for the Irish Border. Could its very lack of development be viewed as a resource? The Border is, in my experience, a very quiet place (if not quite untouched). Many lengths of it would make good walkers' routes. And of course any such initiative would be, by definition, a cross-border initiative.

Wind farms mapped

2007-08-19T08:41:00.004+01:00

Personally I love the sight of wind turbines along a ridge. Like Don Quixote they give me grand ideas. Although, unlike Don Quixote, I don’t want to fight them. My grand ideas are about the possibilities of technology. This map (not my work) gives the location of wind farms in Northern Ireland.

The landscape of forgetting

2007-07-29T11:52:00.001+01:00

The county councils of Donegal and Tyrone plant extensive forests of Norway Spruce for the harvesting of wood. Along their shared border, around the pilgrimage site of Lough Derg, two forests meet and produce a plantation of Christmas trees twelve miles square. That is a lot of forest when you are cycling, the day is hot, and the water bottle ran dry miles ago. The monotony of identical trees, planted in rows, elongates every second. The silence is complete, not even a bird call. Blankets of pine needles lie deposited on the ground, smothering the possibility of undergrowth. I am told Pine Martens live here, but I do not see any, nor their fondest prey, the squirrel. These woods are Ireland’s true wilderness. They are lonely and offer no sustenance. Forget Pine Martens, I do not even see a blackberry.

Bogs may have once been Ireland’s wilderness. They seemed so during the hungry days of nineteenth century and, personally, during my own bored teenhood. But they were and are a landscape saturated with life. The poet Seamus Heaney makes even more of Ireland’s bogs. He named them Ireland’s memory store, an image which has run through much of his work and clicks with the Irish imagination. The bog is a place to feel rooted. Even abandoned cottages tell common stories and so feel like a kind of home. Ripples in the land turn out to be one hundred year old potato drills, and hint at whole histories. Furthermore, every few years another bog body is found, skin, hair, even hair balm held fast by the acidic bog for 2000 years. Heaney writes: “I could risk blasphemy, / Consecrate the cauldron bog / Our holy ground.”

If the bog is Ireland’s memory then the spruce plantations are its forgetting. Here the land has been formatted and overwritten. Old potato drills were no doubt present here too, but have been buried. Walls have been bulldozed. Streams straightened. No one visits these forests much, apart from car-abandoners, fly-tippers and Christmas tree poachers. It is a dry, impervious landscape, with shallow roots. There is nothing to eat, nothing to look at, nothing to hold on to. I feel something of the ancient pilgrim’s relief when I emerge from the trees, at the shores of Lough Derg.

How history sticks to stones

2007-07-29T10:11:00.002+01:00

At location H86900 H20100 (Irish Grid) a half dismantled portal grave is part of a wall. I camp by it, watched by the sheep. Here, perhaps 3000 years ago it was decided to build a grave. Later, perhaps two brothers were dividing the land or a purchase was made, a wall was built straight through it. The grave had probably long played the roll of demarking a division, now it was set in stone. The stones of the grave were themselves convenient for wall building and the portal was half deconstructed in the raid for materials. Then this wall came to play a section of the Donegal/Tyrone border. It may have been the Ordinance Survey that gave this humble wall that grand promotion. (Every wall, deep down, wants to be a border). Later, in 1922, partition. That county border becomes an international border. Four foot high, keeping apart two different hues on the map. The Border is here rather than there because 3000 years ago some people decided to build a grave here rather than there. Perhaps there had been some other, older, marker that had attracted them. A stood-up stone, a glacier-dropped errant rock. In this way history sticks to stones.

The farmer visits his sheep and me the next morning. Too much council foresting around here he agrees. ‘And its not even the good stuff, that is all second growth.’

But the forest swerves away as I descend to the Mourne Beg river.