Watchtower or Checkpoint

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

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

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?

The Last Watchtower not in Northern Ireland

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.

From the Comments Book

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.

Belfast Exhibition

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

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.