Mourne Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Friend 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, Friend 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 Friend 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.