New Map: Detail

I am putting together a new border map. Here's a snippet. The map contains some of the elements of The Map of Watchful Architecture and much more besides.

Border Journal: Wrecks

I pass two cars abandoned in a ditch and burnt out. The burning, which might have been two or three years ago, caused all their paint to peel off. Now matt steel and brown rust, the wrecks display the same muted pallet as their surroundings. The seats are covered in moss and the springs have erupted.

Mapping a Railway's Ghost

Once a train line ran from Enniskillen, crossed the border at Belcoo-Blacklion and went on to Silgo. It closed in 1957 but traces of the route can still be seen; raised embankments; sidings; bridges. The artist Séamus Dunbar walked the route and developed an interesting, interactive and very fitting way of presenting his journey. The viewer scrolls through the map, seeing what Dunbar saw and in the order he saw it. The journey is described in ink drawings on a piece of paper several metres long. It is wound up inside the device.



Thanks to Alan Meban for the video

By having the viewer scroll through the journey Dunbar has created a temporal as well as a spatial experience, with fingers taking the place of feet. As new vistas open up ahead, the ground already traversed slips out of sight behind, just like walking.

Dunbar has titled the piece Isolarion 1.

Fictional Ulster: In Development

I'm almost done with Version One of Fictional Ulster, a map of places created by writers. Thank you to Patricia Craig who told me about a few locations I might not have discovered otherwise. Patricia, who edited The Ulster Anthology, probably knows more about Ulster literature than anyone else alive. She has read all the bad and forgotten stuff as well, which is useful as fame or literary quality play no part in getting on the Fictional Ulster map.

A preview, from Mid-Ulster

Text Message Map

Earlier this year the artist Susan Lynch walked from Malin Head, Co. Donegal, to Mizen Head, Co. Cork. She recorded her journey in various ways and some were recently on view in PS squared, Belfast. Walking as artistic practice is not a new idea but one thing makes this project different. She often walked with company of one sort or another, her experience seems to have been more about connection than isolation.

Richard Long's stone circle on Aran Mor, Co. Galway.

More usually artists take on landscapes alone, perhaps seeking the singular quality of a spiritual or meditative experience. The artist Richard Long, for example, always walked alone. He would leave stone circles in his wake, the very form of which seem to reinforce the isolated, inward-looking, mode of his creative process. The walk as ritual. Werner Herzog, in a journey recounted in Of Walking in Ice, walked weeks by himself. He was sometimes overwhelmed by loneliness yet it is impossible to imagine he would have done it any other way. My own walks along the Irish border were always done without company. After three or four days and nights by myself I would return to Belfast starry-eyed and socially awkward (even more than usual). Yet, I would have considered walking alone necessary to having an authentic experience of the borderland. I now find it difficult to justify that notion. What harm if I had had another person's influence to spice up the experience? No harm, there may even have been gains.

The poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts teamed up to explore peripheral spaces for their rich and enjoyable book Edgelands. Walker/writer Iain Sinclair also bucks the trend of walking unaccompanied. He brings pals and sometimes his wife on his explorations.

During her journey, Susan Lynch stayed with people every night, members of her family walked sections with her and she was interviewed by local radio along the way. She was also in near-constant text message communication with many people, including her mother. It was print-outs of these text messages that formed the basis of her show, ‘A Malin Head to Mizen Head Approach.’ They were pinned up along wall drawings of the routes she traveled.

This map recounts the journey from Pettigo, Co. Donegal to Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh and on to Clones, Co. Monahagan.

Heading south out of Pettigo.

In Clones.

Lynch's maps have a warmth about them. They are not the trails beaten by solitary types, they are the transcripts of a walk supported all the way by a friendly network. In the exhibition notes the artist emphasizes connections and friendship over personal revelation or meditation. She mentions aiming for the nightly beacon of a glowing window, the house where she would pass the night. "The comfort of the light from each B&B, arrival was imminent, warmth and generosity was certain.” The idea of always moving towards a light takes fullest form when Lynch realises that for the whole journey she was constantly moving towards one big light, the lighthouse at Mizen head.

Townlands

“Townlands are the ancient and generally accepted divisions of the country,” wrote Thomas Spring Rice in 1824. His report was to propose which categories of boundary ought to be included in the upcoming Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Townlands were, and still are, an important measure of locality and often vital to a rural person’s sense of home. When the Ordnance Survey began no one had any idea that Ireland had over 67,000 townlands. In the years to come each would be charted and each name recorded.


Section of the Discoverer Series, 1/50,000 scale.


On the reverse of the same map, the townland map.

Ordnance Survey maps of Northern Ireland have usually included the names of townlands but not always their boundaries. However, the latest edition of the Discoverer Series has elevated the townland once again. On the reverse of the sheet, which was up to now blank, we are presented with a townland map. It is drained of colours, only using red and a few tones from a greyscale. Quite apart from any practical use it may have the townland map is also a thing of intrigue. Does the web of townlands imply a friendly landscape of interlocking communities? Or does it suggest an oppressive net of ancestral knots?

Where few people live, high boggy ground, the townlands are large. In other places they are small, I see one in south Fermanagh that is only about 150 square metres. In these cases the name it is labelled with cannot be fitted inside its border.

And what names townlands can have. Some of my favourites from Sheet 27 of Northern Ireland’s Discoverer Series are: Ummera, Tattycam, Dooross, Gubdoo, Stumpys Hill, Lusty More, Sheepwalk, Greaghatirrive, Bunnablaneybane and Bun.

Stones of Ulster

The Ulster Historical Foundation’s graveyard database is an interesting find. It is called History from Headstones. Whatever urge has us wandering into old graveyards and reading headstones can now be indulged online. The website is for researchers and the generally interested. You can browse via theme. For example, I selected ‘Geographical’ then narrowed the enquiry to ‘Honduras’ (a former home of mine). Two gravestones in Northern Ireland mention the Central American country. The texts are presented in a graveside manner:


Tombstone in Clifton Street graveyard, in Belfast’s Shankhill, from History from Headstones. This is a highly notable graveyard, a stone-written history of Belfast. Read a BBC article about this graveyard here.

There are maps on the site too. The charted graveyards can be filtered in various ways. With a brief look it seems Catholic, Church of Ireland, and Presbyterian graveyards are fairly evenly spread throughout Northern Ireland, with the exception of Fermanagh’s shortage of Presbyterians.


Coloured dots give the locations of all graveyards in Fermanagh charted by History from Headstones


The four Presbyterian graveyards in Fermanagh

Lately I have been working in the Built Environment Library in the Cathedral Quarter, Belfast. I go there to gather data for The Map of Watchful Architecture. This library is another excellent resource. It has been especially useful for plotting World War II structures. Thank you to all the staff who have helped me. I notice the digital maps I examine there mark famine graves and sites where unbaptised children were buried. In the landscape these sites are usually unmarked, they certainly do not have headstones. So, it is no surprise that History from Headstones does not include these kinds of sites. After death, we may need a stone stood in our stead so not to be forgotten.

But History from Headstones does have the category ‘other.’ This includes Reformed Presbyterian, Non-Subscribing, Moravians, and Quaker. Looking at the maps I wondered if there is any such thing as mixed-denomination graveyards in Northern Ireland. Dr William Roulston, Research Director of the Ulster Historical Foundation, tells me that ‘other’ also includes graveyards of antiquity not associated with any particular denomination now. “For example, graveyards on the site of a former monastery or medieval parish church. Such graveyards can be considered mixed-denomination in the sense that persons of all religious backgrounds lie buried together. There would be around three hundred such graveyards in Northern Ireland.”

It is too bad the database does not extend beyond Northern Ireland into the rest of Ulster. Of course the limitation is understandable, the creators of the database had to stop somewhere. Also, assuming they used some pre-existing information, surveys from both sides of the Border are not always compatible. This is something I am discovering as I continue compiling The Map of Watchful Architecture. Alas, the Built Heritage Library does not have a direct southern equivalent. I bet there were World War II pillboxes built in the southern Border counties too, but this information is not easily accessible.

I will have to keep digging.

Links: The Northern Ireland Environment Agency: Built Environment and the Ulster Historical Foundation's History from Headstones.

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.