Back to the drawing board

Faber & Faber (both of them) don't like the icons I've used on my latest border map. It is the map that will illustrate The Rule of the Land, my book about the border that they are publishing next year.

Too boxy perhaps, too blocky. I am just going to do what I'm told, so it's back to the drawing board.

Of Walking in Ice

Herzog on location with Fitzcarraldo, released in 1982.

In 1974 the German filmmaker Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man), heard a friend in Paris was ill. Herzog had a plan to save her from death.

I took a jacket, a compass and a duffel bag with the necessities. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself. (foreword)

Herzog walked from Munich to Paris. The book Of Walking in Ice is the record of the journey. It is a route map in words. A scrapbook of images, signs, and encounters. One aspect of Herzog’s journey, that makes me feel a bit of a softy, is that he sets off in bleak mid-winter. Most of my Border walking is done in good weather. Looking at my bookshelves I find I am not alone in minding the weather. Iain Sinclair’s walks, such as those recorded in Edge of the Orison, are planned, short, and warm. Colm Tóibín, Walking along the Border, encountered some drizzle but never really suffered. He was never far from a B&B and a fry. In contrast, Herzog’s need to walk was so intense that he set off just when travelling was hardest. Even if this was just a stylistic choice, and I think it is not, then it would be a compelling and original one.

There is more. Herzog’s journey is continuous. No weekend hikes strung together artificially on the page. He walks three solid weeks on a low budget. At night he breaks into holiday chalets for a dry place to sleep. With aching feet, dirty hair, and soaking clothes Herzog starts to look, feel, and perhaps genuinely be, deranged.

Then snow, snow, rainy snow, snowy rain; I curse Creation. What for? I am so utterly soaked that I avoid people by crossing the sodden meadows, in order to save myself from facing them. Confronting the villages I stand ashamed. Confronting the children I change my face to look like one of the community. (36)

In one of his essays, Paul Auster remarks that to be truly engaged with a novel we have to feel the author was compelled to write it. The writer had no choice other than to write it. So it is with Herzog’s walk. He cannot wait until spring. He cannot plan a route. He does not even have a map when he leaves. He is gripped by compulsion. A compulsion powerful enough to reach from the page and grip the reader too.


Border apple tree on The Map of Encounters 1.0.

By the last week Herzog’s loneliness aches harder than his feet. Of Walking in Ice’s theme of loneliness is a direct result of travelling in winter. Nature will keep you very good company in the summer, but in winter it shrugs you off. A few years ago I wrote a short piece about finding an apple tree on the Border, green and fully loaded with fruit. It was an inviting, generous sight. Herzog’s meeting with an apple tree is very different. It says something of the difficulties that he faced and that I avoided. But I am not congratulating myself. I envy the stridency of Herzog’s journey.

Apples lie rotting in the wet clay soil around the trees, nobody is harvesting them. On one of the trees, which seemed from afar like the only tree left with any leaves, apples in mysterious cluster hang close to one another. There isn’t a single leaf on the wet tree, just wet apples refusing to fall. I picked one, it tasted pretty sour, but the juice in it quenched my thirst. I threw the apple core against the tree, and the apples fell like rain. When the apples had becalmed again, restful on the ground, I thought to myself that no one could imagine such human loneliness. (72)

Map of Teelin

I first saw Dan McGinley's map of Teelin, Co. Donegal, pinned to the wall of the community centre in a small village called Kilcar. I was struck by the amount of detail and the sheer size of the map, it is about 150 centimetres tall, and was immediately determined that more people should see it. It was one of the maps that compelled me to organise Mapping Alternative Ulster.

Dan McGinley charted the local place names of several rural locations in Donegal, starting with places he knew from his own childhood. “As a child I found the place names fascinating,” he told me in an email, “they had the quality of incantations.” I am delighted that two of his maps are in the show.

The Black Hut

Walking the border near Derry/Londonderry I passed the site of the Black Hut, a tiny shop which is now gone but plays a big role in this area’s memory. The hut was just over the border in the south. It is the focus point of many tales archived in community history projects and found in newspaper’s folksy columns. Nostalgic retellings have transformed and expanded the Black Hut until one would think it was as deep as a cave and full of magical treasures. In reality it was a one-room general shop selling vegetables, cigarettes, tins of treacle, flour, sweets and lemonade. Its golden age was the Second World War. There was rationing in the north but many basics could still be purchased in the south — “They had tons of butter in there,” recalls one interviewee.

There were a few different Black Huts over the years but, as far as I know, they were all on the Altaghaderry Road, under Holy Well Hill.

Many boys and girls had their first cigarette at the Black Hut, along with cross-border romances and, at the customs post on the way back, adventures in criminality. All the Black Hut recollections I have read are from childhood, which might explain how a shack has taken on a sheen of wondrousness. It makes sense, of course, to have lived into our era, the era of the oral history project, a person must have been very young during the Second World War. But I think there is another reason: most of the Black Hut’s customers were children. The Black Hut was a long hike from the terraced streets Derry/Londonederry. It was time-rich children who made the trip most. It was true of my own childhood, faced with the empty expanse of a sunny Saturday afternoon, we needed only slight excuses to take a hour’s walk, a dozen lemon drops might be enough. The Black Hut was the destination of a thousand childhood rambles. There was adventure to be had too, risks that were primed for kids. Customs officers, nicknamed Water Rats, patrolled the roads. Parents sent their children to buy things at the Black Hut because they would not be stopped and searched by officers the way an adult might. Children could also stay off the roads, skipping across the fields with a naturalistic ease that adults couldn’t quite muster.

A few years ago a group called GOAL, Gaining Opportunities to Address Legacies, organised a reminiscence walk from Derry to the site of the Black Hut and have published a pamphlet about it.

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.