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.