Border Journal: Vehicle Graveyard

Not long after leaving Lough Melvin, Just passed the point where the border turns to go around Co. Donegal I find a whole graveyard of vehicles. There is a school bus, a tipper truck and several cars. They are sat side by side but could not be called parked. Dull pallor, flat tyres and popped seams; they have not moved in years. There is a fire engine, a vintage ford, a 1950s Thames to be exact, with big rounded wheel guards. It still has its ladder on its back. These vehicles are not so much dumped as stored away here on the border.



Someone probably thought they come in useful some day, for parts at least. But the days turned into years and here they still are, crumbling away, a retirement home that nobody visits. Motorcycle skeletons are jumbled together on the ground. The seats have rotted away and exposed the springs. I recognise the Hondas, these used to be popular among farmers. They were basic machines with a small puttering motor but certain elegance around their shapely speedometer, handlebars and the small rearview mirror on the end of thin chrome arms. You don’t see them on the roads any more. I seem to have found the hidden graveyard where they ended up. Tall dandelions are pushing up through their spokes and ribs.

Border Guards

The border guards are the cows. They are stoic, standing with their minds geared-down, like security staff of an unvisited museum. But they can have curiosity too. More than once I am awoken at dawn by a herd pressed in around my tent. They rub their spluttery lips against the sides, great snorts and nostril blasts blowing convex shapes into the material. Once, just before waking, I dream I am in bed with a cow.



Lydia Davis wrote an entire, although very short, book about three cows that lived in a field near her home. It is a wonderful study, coming at her neighbours from multiple angles until, somewhere between the paragraphs, the essence of cattle is expressed; the cowishness of cows. This seems to be best observed by looking at them in herds, individual cows just seem incomplete. They are a group form of life, a lone cow is an irrelevance, like a single ant. Davis notes this essence too, hovering between the individual and the group, but breaks up the trio near her house into constitute parts with the application of time and a steady gaze. “They are nearly the same size, and yet one is the largest, one the middle-sized, and one the smallest.”

Walking the border, ever onwards, I never encounter the same cows twice, yet every cow is essentially the same cow. It seems better to think of them as hills or gates or clouds, replicated to one pattern. Endless but predictable, the border’s bovine furniture.

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.

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: 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.

New Map, New Symbols

I am working on a new border map. It will chart some defensive structures, as I have done with a previous map, but includes other border elements too. The key is expanding as I widen my notion of how we attempt to claim and control space.

I have no name for the new map yet.

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.