Mapping Alternative Ulster: Strabane

The Mapping Alternative Ulster exhibition is currently running in the Alley Arts Centre, Strabane. A few new maps have been added since the run in Belfast, including a wonderful map of an imagined metro system for Omagh. 'Omagh Metro System' is showing with the work of about a dozen other artist/cartographers, all of whom use maps to promote different ways of looking at where we live.

The map is by Benny Sweeney. Click here for his website.

For more info about the show see; www.mappingalternativeulster.net.

Border Journal: Upland

Upland now. Semi-feral sheep amble along fences trailing woolly dreadlocks. I find a border connection at the bottom of a soggy field, a plank bridge going over a ditch. A donkey stands guarding it. I follow lanes, keeping an eye on the border to my right or left.

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

The Illustration of Possession

Much Irish mapping was born of the colonial age. In fact Ireland, in the Elizabethan period, was the first country to be systemically mapped. This was not because Ireland was in the firm grip of central control, almost the opposite. It was Ireland’s very untamedness that meant it required mapping. Denis Wood, a writer and theorist on cartography would recognise this, “the truth is,” he writes, “maps are weapons.” Maps just propose territories; various enforcements then follow and make the territory happen. Or, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard neatly put it, “the map precedes the territory.”

Queen Elizabeth’s surveyor and map‐maker in Ireland, at the turn of the 17th century, was Richard Bartlett. He travelled with Lord Mountjoy during his campaign and his maps played a part in the attempt to tame Ulster. The people of Donegal, when Bartlett went to survey their locality, seem to have instinctually grasped that his maps were weapons. In 1609 Sir John Davis, the Irish Attorney General, wrote to the Earl of Salisbury of Bartlett’s fate. “ … when he came into Tyrconnell the inhabitants took off his head, because they would not have their country discovered.” But this rebellious action was by then too late. The Earls had flown. Bartlett and others had already produced folios of charts. The mapping of Ulster had preceded. Now it was territory.


Detail from the above map.

But Bartlett’s work also shows that maps were something other than a weapon of colonisation. Take his map of South East Ulster, 1603, it represents Dungannon and Tullaghoge. This chart is highly illustrative and not as directly tactical as many of Bartlett’s others. It is as much a celebration of victory as a map. At the bottom in the centre we see the inauguration stone of the O’Neill has been claimed and above it, Dungannon. With a graphic stridency, the English flag flies from the fort, backed in flat blue and centrally located on the page. It says, South‐East Ulster: under new management. Not just a map, it is the illustration of possession.

Dungannon Exhibition

As part of its arts festival Dungannon borough will host an art exhibition in the old Territorial Army garages on Castlehill. The organisers remark that this exhibition space is a contested site. It has been the high vantage point of local powers for centuries, an O'Neill site, a plantation era townhouse, and most recently a base for the British Army. To reflect this history artists were invited to submit work concerned with the transformation or the claiming of space, either personal or public.



I thought they might like The Map of Watchful Architecture, and sure enough, it has been accepted and will feature in the Art on the Hill exhibition. It runs from 1 May until the 10 May 2009. I will print the map on paper for this show, large.

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.

Across the Blackwater

The Map of Connections is a map of unofficial Border crossings. Perhaps the most picturesque I have discovered so far are these substantial stepping stones crossing the Blackwater river. (Location: Ele 32m IH 71092 ITH 47266, Irish Grid) For a section the Blackwater is used as the Border between Tyrone and Monaghan, therefore the Border between northern and southern Ireland. There was no one around to ask about how and when these boulders were placed. It could have been twenty years ago, it was possibly two hundred.


The stepping stones are mere metres from Burn’s Bridge. Why did the locals go to the considerable effort of positioning the boulders with a bridge so near? As mentioned, it is possible the stones predate it. However, compare the worn stones of the arch to the left in the photograph and the smooth new stones of the right arch. I suspect this bridge was blown-up during the Troubles and only rebuilt recently. While this mode of connection was denied to them the locals may have taken things into their own hands. They built their own connection. Now I am happy to map it.