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.

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.

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.

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.

There used to be ...

These photos, published by a newspaper, are a reminder of change.

Border checkpoint, 1980s

The same place today

As I travelled the border I visited many spots that formally hosted checkpoints. Often you can tell a border road was the site of a checkpoint because uprooting the defences has left a gaping lay-by, about the length of a truck and trailer. Empty cans, dead leaves, plastic bottles and shopping bags are blown together in the corners. These areas have become truck stops, or been filled with second-hand cars for sale, left parked with signs in their windscreens: “£2000 ONO” and a mobile phone number, northern or southern or both.

I got the photographs from here. 

Shared Horizons

The warlike range of symbols on the Map of Watchful Architecture leads to it getting some brisk readings. I have printed and distributed many copies of the map by now, and exhibited it, enough exposure to have noticed this theme. Sometimes viewers aim merely to place the map, as quickly as possible, in their pre-set political views. For this reason The Map of Connections is in some ways more successful. It not only maps a new topic, it does it with a new language. This results in it receiving closer reading. It cannot be handled any other way.

The knee-jerk reactions are too bad because my map of defensive architecture does actually tell a shared story. I work hard to make it even-handed.


Sinn Féin's map. Section only. Monaghan and Armagh.

A truly warlike and now outdated map on a Sinn Féin website marks the locations of Northern Irish security structures. It is a limited view. The map has no interest in the historical. Furthermore it completely blacks out the south of Ireland, ignoring, for example, the Irish Army barracks in Monaghan (decommissioned recently as well).

Elsewhere on the Internet is FAIR, Families Acting for Innocent Relatives. They aim “to ensure that the great sacrifice of the Unionist Community in South Armagh will never be forgotten.” This website has a grim reactionary tone, it is a surprise to read anyone still arguing for the securing of the Border. Alternative voices are dismissed thoughtlessly as “glossy chat.” But that seems harmless when compared to headlines like: “Orange Halls Attacked By Catholics In Co Tyrone.” (November 2008) The vandals were not caught, their religion is assumed, probably quite reasonably, but does FAIR consider vandalism to be a religious rite? Surely “Orange Hall Attacked by Vandals in Co. Tyrone” would be a more correct description. Or, if it is facts we are concerned with, then simply: “Orange Hall Attacked in Co. Tyrone.”


FAIR's map of security, south Armagh.

The FAIR website has a map of security structures too. They would prefer the watchtowers and checkpoints were still in place. They say it “is madness to reduce the level of security.” But, and this brings me back to defensive architecture being a shared past, where did they get their map? They lifted it from the Sinn Féin website. They just changed Sinn Féin’s oppressive term “spy post” to a friendly “surveillance tower.” On my map I call them watchtowers but whatever they are called, they are a common story.

Gravitational Attraction

A little while ago the European Space Agency launched GOCE, its gravity mapping satellite. GOCE stands for Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer. It is already in orbit but in a couple of weeks its batteries will be fully charged-up, its systems calibrated and its work will begin. Unlike a typical satellite, with spindly aerials, disks, and protruding panels, this satellite is streamlined and sleek. GOCE needs aerodynamic features because it will fly at only 250km above the surface of the Earth, lower than most Earth orbiting satellites, and will encounter wisps of atmosphere. It will plot the earth’s gravitational field to a higher level of accuracy than we are currently able.


GOCE's mission will require a high level of stability, hence the fins and its ion-propulsion engine. See an animation here: www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GOCE_animation/

Things have different weights when in different places. The gravitational attraction an object experiences, its desire to rush to the centre of the earth, is effected by the presence of irregularities in the shape of the earth, the uneven distribution of mass beneath the crust, and the presence of mountains or even large buildings. The intensity of the desire varies and the GOCE will map this variable terrain. It will draw a surface of equal gravitational force, sometimes called the geoid, as it dips above and below the Earth's physical surface. A science blogger gives this illustration:

Say you take a one-pound weight, and you walk along the surface of the Earth. If the density of the ground underneath you begins to increase, the gravitational force will increase and the weight will get heavier. To counteract this, you raise the weight up higher - therefore reducing gravity's influence. If, as you walk along, you continue to adjust the height of the weight so that it always weighs one pound, you will be following the surface of the geoid. www.scientificblogging.com/welcome_my_moon_base/goce_aerodynamic_satellite_will_map_geoid

So, those African women carrying supplies on their heads have actually found a way to make the load a fraction lighter. A very small fraction.

One of the most useful outcomes of GOCE’s work will be an increased understanding of the movement of the oceans. But, personally, I am looking forward to the maps. Gravitational forces at play have been mapped before. The difference between standard gravity and the actual gravity found in a certain place is sometimes called the Bouguer anomaly. I examined a Bouguer Anomaly Map of Northern Ireland recently.


From the Bouguer Anomaly map

This is a detail from southern Armagh. It can be seen that Slieve Gullion is a highly positive area. This would probably make a kind of sense to anyone familiar with this mountain. It is a proud and distinguished peak and seems to deserve any form of special attention. Slieve Gullion is an extinct volcano standing apart from other mountains but the highest in the county nonetheless. I wonder if this apartness, free from softening influences, contributes to the large positive Bouguer anomaly wrapped around the mountain. Geologists reckon the strength of this anomaly indicates a high-density mass of rock concealed under the mountain. I can report that, when climbing Slieve Gullion lately, my backpack sure seemed heavier as I approached the peak. But seriously, I wonder could a mountain with a large positive Bouguer anomaly, such as Slieve Gullion, be noticeably more tiring to climb?


Gullion at sunset, image taken from here.

Slieve Gullion’s powerful presence also means it has made frequent appearances in myths, legends, and more recent writings from Northern Ireland. It seems the mountain carries an unusually high cultural weight too. In the meantime we can watch for the GOCE, a fast-moving dot passing 250km above our heads.

A 2000 Year Tradition

I want The Map of Watchful Architecture to help us see old structures afresh and new structures in a historical light, bringing new illumination. The map represents certain structures, perhaps built centuries apart, as fundamentally the same. For example, the Border was predicted by the 2nd century structure of the Dorsy, an official entrance into Ulster. Nowadays, just south of the Border the Garda Síochána perform spot checks on buses, looking for illegal migrants. Instead of two categories, 1st Century Gate and 21st Century Immigration Control, my map uses just one: checkpoint. Immigration control is revealed as inheritor of a long tradition while at the same time an ancient site is drawn into the contemporary dynamic.


Detail from The Map of Watchful Architecture 1.0

Adding to the diversity of checkpoints in Ireland is a timber castle discussed in Archaeology Ireland lately (Volume 21, No. 2. Issue No. 80). We are well used to seeing old stone towers in the landscape and it is interesting to realise that once wooden towers dotted the landscape too. None have survived but there is documentary evidence for them. One particular wooden tower is referred to in reports, letters, and we even have an image. In 1575, under the earl of Essex, the English constructed a fort on a strategic crossing-point of the River Blackwater, near modern day Blackwatertown. This construction was to control access in and out of western Ulster. It was the gateway to a contested territory, Hugh O’Neill’s lands in South-East Tyrone.

Apologies for the low quality of this reproduction

On the one side of the Blackwater the tower was of stone. On the other side is an impressive wooden tower, four stories high. It is the darker tower in the above image. Huge uprights at each corner are obviously the major structural features. Note the bridge; it seems to link both towers. Anyone using it certainly had to pass through the right-side structure and possibility the timber tower too. This makes the structure a filtering installation. A sixteen century checkpoint. Part of a long tradition going back, and forward.