The Rule of the Land: 2nd Edition

The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border is about to be published in paperback.

I was able to make a few small edits before this edition went into print. For example I got to add the location of recent protest to one of the maps. The Killeen protest occurred shortly after the UK voted to leave the EU and was against the enforcement of a 'hard border'. The event was widely reported at the time. The protestors set up a demonstration customs hut as a reminder of what the border was pre-1993 when both the UK and the Republic of Ireland joined the single market.

Reader's Survey

Apart from writing books and making maps I work for a university. In the UK university system research staff like me are asked to show the impact of our work. To that end I have created this short survey for readers of The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border. If you have read the book I would be very grateful if you'd comment on it here:

bit.ly/ReadingTheLand

None of the five questions are compulsory. You can use the tick-box replies or use the comments boxes along the way, or you can use both.

Thank you for your time.

An Teorainn

There is some striking aerial footage of Ireland's border in this trailer for An Teorainn, a RTÉ documentary that follows the borderline from end-to-end, a bit like I did.

I was interviewed for this programme and talked about many border subjects, I'm not sure what parts they are going to use but there is a snippet of me discussing the life of Sean Quinn in this trailer. An Teorainn will be broadcast in October.

Border Carrots

I brought a Swedish film crew for a tour of the border recently and in the rolling farmland on the border near Caledon we meet a farmer called Henry. He presented both the producer and I with large bunches of carrots and consented to be interviewed for a few minutes.

He discussed mainly how his working life had been improved by the 'soft' border and expressed the wish that it remained so. He was charming, so charming in fact I was concerned the editor would cut me out of the documentary and just use the footage of him. However, I see I made it into the final version.

Thanks to Henry and the crew from SVT's literary arts programme Babel.

Edinburgh Festival

Julian Sayerer has written a wonderful book about using this thumb to get across the United States, Interstate: Hitch Hiking Through the State of a Nation. I am really looking forward to appearing with him in the Edinburgh Festival next month.

That photo of me is ten years old and, it seems, cannot be escaped.

Brexit and the Border

The New York Times invited me to write a short piece about Ireland's border in the light of Brexit. It is over on their website. It includes some great photos by Rob Stothard, like this one from Armagh.

Patrick McCabe and Fictional Ulster

I was delighted to be part of the International Literature Festival Dublin lately, an event with Patrick McCabe. We had a good conversation and I hope the audience enjoyed it as much as I did.

In the course of a dozen books McCabe has made the Irish midlands, and the border region, his own. He has often used fictional towns as settings, and so several sites on my map Fictional Ulster come from his novels. Carn, Cullymore and Tyreelin, to name a few examples. Patrick McCabe and Sam Hanna Belle are probably the writers that have contributed most locations to Ulster's fictional landscape.

As the map owes a lot to Patrick McCabe, and because I thought he might like it, I brought a print of Fictional Ulster with me to Dublin and presented it to him during the event.

I have a few more festival appearances this summer, such as the Belfast Book Festival, The Borris House Festival of Ideas and the Edinburgh Book Festival.

The Rule of the Land on the Radio

The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week during last month. It can still be heard online, but only for a few more days. Click here.

I gave an half hour interview on WNPR (USA) lately, it can be heard online here.

I was also part of a panel discussion on BBC Radio 4 Start the Week.

Message in a Map

The picture book artist Oliver Jeffers has sent this cartographic message to his homeland. I don't think I've seen Northern Ireland used as an O before, but it works. Jeffers says; "Perhaps one of the more important votes in Europe this year will happen in Northern Ireland in a few days. We have a choice of moving forwards, or moving backwards toward old familiar battle lines. The result will affect everyone in the Province and beyond. So either get out and vote, or as my Grandma used to say, 'forever hold your peace'".

Northern Ireland gets a chance to change its government on 2 March.

Jeffers' original post is on Facebook. 

Map of Ulster Cottages

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 at the back, as shown in the image below, and was filled with a bed next, keeping it close 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 unshifting style of tradesmen who don't travel much, 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.

Mapping Alternative Ulster in Armagh

Mapping Alternative Ulster is on again, this time in the Market Place gallery in Armagh. It runs until 7 January 2017.

The exhibition showcases a dozen map-makers, each taking a very different look at the places we think we know so well. These map-makers are local historians, activists, artists, geographers and urban planners, all interpreting our surroundings in different ways. Together, they cover the ground from Donegal to Down to Armagh. Mapping Alternative Ulster re-thinks our representation on maps.

Belfast versus Copenhagen

These Google maps enable us to compare the provision of cycling lanes in Belfast and Copenhagen. Belfast is a small city, and relatively flat, it could be perfect for cycling but its single strength is the continuous route along the Lagan. Note the rather ridiculous short stretches of cycle lane in Belfast, picking up and then vanishing again a few pedal strokes later.

Thanks to @jrolloos21 for putting the maps together

It may seem unfair to use Copenhagen for this comparison, as the city is famously cycle-friendly. However the comparison is useful as in the 70s and 80s Copenhagen was struggling with similar issues to those Belfast still has; the dominance of the motor car for example. Copenhagen took definite steps to change the commuting culture in on its streets, and rebalance the city in the way shown by the map. They introduced an ambitious Cycle Policy in 2002, among its aims were to increase the proportion of Copenhagen cyclists who say they feel safe cycling in the city from 57% to 80%. They also aimed to increase the proportion of people cycling to work from 34% to 40% by 2012. They did not quite achieve this, but by 2014 they had exceeded it. Copenhagen now has 454 kilometres of cycle lanes, used by 36,000 cyclists every day.

I got the statistics from here and here.

Hanging Mapping Alternative Ulster

Thank you to everyone in the Market Place gallery, Armagh, for making the show look so great. It will open tomorrow and run for five weeks.

Comments Please

In the Belfast run of Mapping Alternative Ulster one visitor used the comments book to chart their own tour of the show

Running an exhibition has made me realise the importance of a comments book. I leave an unlined notebook with every run of Mapping Alternative Ulster. I leave it by the exit along with a request that visitors use it to write down their reactions to the works. I have found lots of engagement with the show expressed in the notebooks and, taken together, they indicate that Mapping Alternative Ulster is striking a cord. One visitor commented during the Belfast run of the show: “This exhibition is both fascinating and inspiring – in everyday life we can see maps as quite banal things but the feelings and sentiments that locations can evoke in is very clearly displayed here. Many thanks for helping me look at the map of Ulster in a new way.”

The Rule of the Land

So, The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border will be published by Faber & Faber at the beginning of Feburary 2017. It is in part the story of Ireland’s border and a portrait of its landscape and people. It is also about reading the power dynamics in a landscape. Almost any landscape has these, but Ireland's border is particularly loaded with claims and counterclaims.

First this three-hundred-mile line demarcated counties, then countries and will next be the frontier of the European Union. It was striking how little Ireland was discussed in the lead-up to the UK referendum on EU membership. You might have thought the border between the UK and the EU was going to be the English Channel. But it won’t be, it’s here, and it’s as thin as wire.

The Rule of the Land explores the borderland during a fragile moment, before an uncertain future.

Capturing a Powerbase

I am organising the photographs for my forthcoming book, including this one of Grianán of Aileach, near the border in Co. Donegal. It is probably just as well the photos will be rendered in black and white, as some might not believe the blue of the sky. But it was that blue, I swear.

There are about thirty photographs going into the book. Most of them are of examples of the architecture of power I visited along the border. Grianán of Aileach is probably the most visited of all of them, in fact I had to photoshop a tourist's head out of this photograph.

Another New Icon

Many border bridges were blown up or dismantled during the Troubles. They are now being reconnected, but during my border surveys I found a few remnants. This icon is for my next map and is an attempt to capture the essence of these breaks.

Hand-drawn Icons

Hopefully they'll like these more ...

These icons are from about thirty icons for the map that will illustrate my forthcoming book. I have been staring at this map for a long time now, moving things about, redrawing lines. I will need glasses by the time I'm done.

Back to the drawing board

Faber & Faber (both of them) don't like the icons I've used on my latest border map. It is the map that will illustrate The Rule of the Land, my book about the border that they are publishing next year.

Too boxy perhaps, too blocky. I am just going to do what I'm told, so it's back to the drawing board.

Of Walking in Ice

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. A few years ago I wrote a short piece about finding an apple tree on the Border, green and fully loaded with fruit. It was an inviting, generous sight. 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)