Watching the Border

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

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

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 is 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

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 tends 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

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

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. Donegal is given 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 the west 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 expanded 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

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.”