Irelands of the Mind
Irelands of the Mind:
Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture
Edited by
Richard C. Allen and Stephen Regan
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture, Edited by Richard C. Allen
and Stephen Regan
This book first published 2008 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Richard C. Allen and Stephen Regan and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-422-7, ISBN (13): 9781847184221
To our parents and to the memory of our Irish ancestors
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Chapter One............................................................................................... 12
‘The Wilds of Ireland’: Tourism and Western Terrain in the
late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries
KEVIN J. JAMES
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 32
‘Keeping the Faith’: The Catholic Press and the Preservation
of Celtic Identity in Britain in the late Nineteenth Century
JOAN ALLEN
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 50
The Language Question
DIARMAIT MAC GIOLLA CHRÍOST
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 73
Anthropology and the Construction of Irish Identity
TANYA HEDGES DUROY AND D. DOUGLAS CAULKINS
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 96
Imagining and Addressing the Nation on Irish Talk Radio
MICHAEL HIGGINS
Chapter Six.............................................................................................. 110
‘I’ve come home, and home I’m gonna stay’. The Quiet Man
in Irish-American Cinematic History
RICHARD C. ALLEN
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 129
‘People, not issues’: Adapting Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal
SARAH NEELY
viii
Table of Contents
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 142
Into The Misty: Van Morrison and Irish Cinematic Lyricism
PETER MILLS
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 158
‘Ireland’s controversial icon’: A Study of the Work of Sinéad
O’Connor
TONY PURVIS
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 176
Semicolonial Yeats? Fairyland, Ireland, Scotland, and Ulster
WILLY MALEY
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 194
‘There’s No ‘Race’ Like Home’: Race, Place, Nation
and Narration in Brian Friel’s The Home Place
ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 210
The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: Before and After the Ceasefire
STEPHEN REGAN
Contributors............................................................................................. 223
Index........................................................................................................ 227
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the preparation of Irelands of the Mind we have received significant
encouragement from many quarters. We wish to thank all the contributors,
whose forbearance to our seemingly endless requests, as well as their good
humour, has helped us to complete the collection of essays. Colleagues
and friends have also assisted in the progression of this work and warrant
a mention, particularly Owen Ashton, Rob Colls, Martin Farr, Tim Kirk,
Roger Newbrook, Rosie White and the ‘foreign legion’ for the evenings
out. We offer our warmest thanks, as well, to Michael O’Neill, Gareth
Reeves and Patricia Waugh for their enthusiastic encouragement and
support.
We are very grateful to Kate Legon for the splendid index and to
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, who have been patient with us while we
put this volume together. Naturally, we thank our families, especially our
parents, for providing love, protection and sage counsel over the years. We
are indebted to Joan for offering a calming influence and continuous
support for this work, particularly when it seemed to resemble McCarthy’s
Bar. Finally, although born in England and Wales, we recognize the
importance of our Irish ancestry and those sons and daughters of Ireland,
living and dead, who have provided the inspiration for this study. We
dedicate this volume to them all.
INTRODUCTION
In the past two decades, Ireland has undergone the most dramatic
economic and social transformation since the inauguration of the Irish
Free State in 1922. Not surprisingly, the study of modern Irish culture has
been radically altered, too. A new political status within Europe, new
peace initiatives in Northern Ireland, new immigrant groups within the
workplace, new technologies and new modes of communication, new
globalised relations in marketing and advertising – all of these
developments have had profound effects on everyday life in Ireland, but
they have also had a significant impact on the perception of Ireland by
observers elsewhere in the world. The pace of change has been uneven, as
well as rapid, so that some parts of Ireland appear relatively undisturbed
by the accelerated modernity that has been so noticeable in Dublin and
Cork in recent years. An older Ireland lingers on and evokes nostalgia.
Even so, the image of Ireland – the way in which Ireland is thought about,
talked about and written about, the way in which it is depicted in film and
television programmes, in photographs and paintings – is changing
quickly and unexpectedly.
In keeping with the manifold changes in contemporary Irish society,
there have been some profound shifts and developments in that diverse
group of overlapping interests and enthusiasms known as Irish Studies.
The field of enquiry has grown immensely, and with that broadening
scope of interest has come a massive proliferation of theoretical structures
and approaches, including a strong emphasis on comparative cultural
study. A brief glance at the Irish Studies Review, one of the leading
journals in the field, reveals the extent of the intellectual investment in all
things Irish. As well as the predictable literary pieces on the writings of
Jonathan Swift, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Edna O’Brien, and the
expected historical studies of the Famine and Irish emigration to America,
there are essays on cycling in Victorian Ireland, on Irish rock music, on
Celtic Football Club, and on feminist politics both sides of the political
border. Irish Studies has always been anti-disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary in its leanings. A roving, roguish kind of subject, it has taken
hold eclectically and opportunistically of whatever materials are at hand.
Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture
belongs to a new wave of Irish Studies. If it gathers its topics and
2
Introduction
approaches mainly from literature and history, it also carries with it a
swell of interest in anthropology, media studies, film studies and popular
music. It takes as its subjects of study not only fiction, poetry and drama,
but travel writing and tourist brochures, nineteenth-century newspapers,
radio talk shows, film adaptations of fictional works, and the music and
songs of Van Morrison and Sinéad O’Connor. At one level, the book has a
simple, overriding concern: how is Ireland imagined in all of these cultural
artefacts? At another level, however, it acknowledges the sheer diversity
and complexity of the various Irelands of the mind that its contributors
seek to identify and understand. The prevailing theme throughout the
twelve essays that constitute the book is the complicated sense of
belonging that continues to characterise so much of modern Irish culture.
There are certain preoccupations that have become familiar in Irish
Studies – the construction of national identity, the tension between
tradition and innovation, the experience of exile and homecoming – but
these topics are given a new and invigorated treatment in the context of a
rapidly changing Ireland and a rapidly changing set of intellectual methods
and procedures.
As Kevin James argues in the opening essay of this book, many of our
current day Irelands of the mind were prompted and promoted by the
development of large-scale commercial tourism in Ireland from the 1880s
onwards. If James’s study of the commodification of Ireland by the tourist
industry demystifies the lingering image of an innocent Emerald Isle, it
also has the salutary effect of encouraging a more precise reading of how
rural Ireland was presented to the gaze of prospective travellers; of how its
various regions and regional boundaries were established; and of how the
idea of an indigenous Irish peasantry with its own distinctive folkways,
customs and handicrafts was used in the marketing of Ireland among
British and American visitors. As James points out, the promotion of mass
tourism and the marketing of the Irish countryside at the end of the
nineteenth century stimulated the growth of the railways, the building of
new hotels, and the provision of recreational facilities for golf and fishing.
Ironically, the opening up of Ireland to tourism on large scale succeeded in
transforming those rural regions that were being promoted for their natural
beauty and remoteness in the travel writings of the time.
One of the most valuable aspects of James’s essay is its critical
analysis of the language and imagery deployed in popular travelogues and
guidebooks on Ireland written at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth century. If the purpose of the travelogue is to
record what is indubitably there and to share the experience of a particular
place, it is also to recreate that place, sometimes investing it with a
Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture
3
surprising and unexpected novelty. The travelogue and the guidebook
need to be understood, then, as particular genres of writing, making use of
narrative devices and techniques that often overlap with those of fictional
prose. Of special interest here is the series of letters from the West of
Ireland written by Alexander Innes Shand, a Scottish lawyer, novelist and
journalist, and first published in the Times in 1884. Shand’s letters
(published in a single volume in 1885) clearly utilise those discourses of
romantic and picturesque landscape description that had been well
established in English travel writing since the eighteenth century, but they
also extend the range of descriptive vocabulary in that mode of writing as
they seek to capture the distinctive qualities of the wild Irish West. The
Irelands of the mind that emerge here are often contradictory and
ambivalent. Ireland is both wild and inviting, both savage and benign.
Shand’s writings nevertheless play a crucial role in the modern mapping
of Ireland for tourist consumption, offering tourist paths and itineraries
and promulgating ideas of Ireland’s geographical regions, racial types and
cultural attributes. Letters from the West of Ireland is one of a number of
key texts that, in James’s estimation, have a vital importance in the
historical representation of tourist space.
The West, of course, had already acquired significance as the site of
cultural pilgrimage by the end of the nineteenth century. It continued to be
celebrated as the repository of indigenous Irish culture in the early years of
the twentieth century, gaining a powerful appeal in the writings of the
Irish Literary Revival, especially in the poems of W. B. Yeats and the
plays and essays of J. M. Synge. The West, as a distinctive Ireland of the
mind, was fashioned and refashioned throughout the twentieth century. It
found potent expression in literary and pictorial form, but it was also the
subject of serious ethnographic study. What James’s research reveals,
however, is that while the West was undoubtedly shaped and, in some
ways, ‘invented’ during the mobilisation of the tourist industry, it was
never clearly demarcated as a region, and its boundaries remained fluid
and elusive. In this respect, the West perhaps operates more effectively as
an Ireland of the mind than as an actual geographical entity or spatial
category.
The imagining of Ireland, including the mythologizing of the West, has
often been prompted by the condition of exile. Some of the most intense
and powerful recollections of Ireland have been fashioned at a
considerable geographical distance from it. Joan Allen’s essay (Chapter 2)
considers the support networks that helped to sustain the exiled Irish in
Britain in the late nineteenth century. It shows how solidarity in work,
church and leisure activities, as well as correspondence with family and
4
Introduction
friends in Ireland, formed a ‘connective tissue’ between the former
homeland and the new community. The essay argues persuasively that the
Roman Catholic press played a significant role in the assimilation of Irish
migrants in Britain. Drawing on extensive archival research, it throws new
light on the influence of the Roman Catholic newspapers and journals
launched by Charles Diamond (1858-1934), and it reveals the extent to
which the Catholic mission was allied to Irish nationalist ideals. Keeping
the faith was clearly a political, as well as a religious, obligation.
Diamond’s endeavours found a congenial setting in Newcastle upon
Tyne, where he founded his first Irish newspaper, the Irish Tribune, in
1884. His cultural and political aspirations were shared and supported by
the Member of Parliament for Newcastle, Joseph Cowen, whose
ownership of the Newcastle Chronicle from 1859 onwards had already
ensured sympathetic press coverage of Irish matters, including elections
and political meetings. The friendship between the two newspaper
entrepreneurs strengthened the development of Tyneside Irish nationalist
politics (they were both present when the National Land League of Great
Britain held its convention in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1881). Joan Allen’s
essay offers valuable insights into the cultural and political activities of
Irish communities in the north-east of England in the late nineteenth
century, and it shows how, under Diamond’s control, the Catholic press
not only ‘shored up’ Irish national identity among exiled groups in Britain,
but effectively renewed it.
The period under consideration in Joan Allen’s essay was a crucially
important time for debates about the future of the Irish language and its
role in the formation and development of national identity. Despite the
sharp decline in the use of Gaelic in the years after the Famine, there were
high hopes among the advocates of an Irish Ireland at the end of the
nineteenth century that the language would persist and reassert itself as the
principal expression and guarantor of national identity. The expectation
was that, under a new political order, the language would spread out from
the four main Irish-speaking areas that constituted the Gaeltacht and once
again be established as the dominant tongue. Instead, as Diarmait Mac
Giolla Chríost argues, the Irish language risked becoming ‘a passive
object of iconic and ritualistic regard’. Concentrating on the period
between 1893 and 1926, between the foundation of the Gaelic League and
the dawning of the Irish Free State, he takes a searching look at the idea of
the Gaeltacht, both as an instrument of policy and as an imagined national
landscape – an Ireland of the mind.
Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture
5
Like Kevin James, Mac Giolla Chríost draws on several disciplines –
anthropology, history, geography, politics and sociology – in seeking to
understand the complex relations between historical actualities and
imagined ideals. He argues strongly that the policy of the post-1922 State
on the revival of the Irish language was based on ‘a narrow and illinformed understanding of the causes of the decline of the Irish language’,
and that insufficient attention was given to problems of infrastructure and
education. Despite the elevation of the status of the Irish language by law,
and the enshrinement of Irish as the national language in the 1922
constitution of the Irish Free State, the policy of revival became, by the
1950s, a policy of retreat. Even so, he maintains that there is a continuing
vitality in the language, and he offers a buoyant and comprehensive
account of what he sees as a fresh dynamism in Irish language policy in
both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Tanya Hedges Duroy and Douglas Caulkins offer a vigorous and
forthright account of changing ideas of Ireland and Irishness from a
contemporary anthropological perspective, noting at the same time how
anthropology, itself, has been changing with regard to studies of Ireland,
and how it has sometimes been distrusted for its misrepresentation of Irish
culture. In Chapter 4, they acknowledge the difficulty of contending with
what seems like a chaotic diversity of identities in Ireland, both rural and
urban, both traditional and new. Acknowledging the need for a relevant
Irish anthropology attuned to contemporary realities, they draw attention
to areas of social and political debate where new definitions of Ireland and
Irishness might emerge, including women’s rights and the role of
universities in civic life. They note how integration within the European
Union has already brought about a dramatic cultural transformation in
Ireland.
The exploration of identity in the essay by Hedges Duroy and Caulkins
is based on fieldwork carried out in western and north-western Ireland
over a period of two years. The purpose of the fieldwork was to illuminate
areas of consensus, contestation and uncertainty in current ideas of what
constitutes Irish identity. The research involved both participant
observation and systematic interview, and it drew on notions of identity
associated with other Celtic cultures, including those of Scotland and
Wales. Interviewees were asked to comment on brief narratives that
illustrated concepts frequently associated with Irish identity, such as
nostalgia and emotionalism. What Hedges Duroy and Caulkins provide is
a way of mapping identity that relies on systematic analysis rather than
abstract stereotyping, and what they reveal is a complex relationship
between cultural ideals and everyday practice.
6
Introduction
In Chapter 5, Michael Higgins carries forward the investigation into
how modern Ireland contends with globalisation and multi-national
capitalism. Taking his cue from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined
Communities (1983), he asks some probing questions about the ways in
which national identity and national belonging are created and sustained.
His research is concerned specifically with media studies, and with the
vital relationship between national identity and technologies of
communication. He concentrates, in particular, on the role of radio and the
popular phenomenon of the radio talk show, and he speculates on whether
there is an explicitly Irish form of radio ‘chat’.
Drawing on recent studies of the political and cultural influence of
radio, including popular American radio programmes, Higgins turns to
specific examples of talk radio in Ireland and the United Kingdom. His
main focus is on the Gerry Ryan Show, broadcast by RTÉ (Radio Telefis
Eíreann) and currently rated as the most popular non-news programme on
Irish radio. His contention is that crucial insights into the formation of
national identity can be gained from a close scrutiny of the forms of
discourse that constitute programmes such as the Gerry Ryan Show, in
which Ireland is ‘being imagined on a daily basis’. In keeping with the
ambivalence and contestation observed by Hedges Duroy and Caulkins, he
concludes that radio provides a cultural space where discourses of
globalisation and modernity contend with what is presented as an
inherently Irish predisposition for banter, rhetoric and anecdote. If radio
seems to present Irish loquacity as a persistent stereotype, it also
celebrates ‘the aesthetics of talk’.
Richard Allen, in Chapter 6, considers how Ireland and the Irish are
imagined on the big screen, from the perspective of Hollywood in the
1950s. His essay takes a fresh look at The Quiet Man (1952), one of the
best-known and most successful film productions in Irish-American
cinematic history. Asking what Ireland of the mind is being offered to
viewers of The Quiet Man immediately raises some complex issues to do
with the Irish inheritance of the director, John Ford, with the adaptation of
a short story published in The Green Rushes (1935) by the Irish writer,
Maurice Walsh, and with the political events of the late 1920s, in which
Walsh’s story is set. Richard Allen’s essay offers a new critical appraisal
of the production history of The Quiet Man, but it also provides
considerable scope for new critical interpretations of the film.
In keeping with the study of Irish culture among exiled communities in
Chapter 2, Richard Allen’s essay gives careful consideration to the
predicament of the creative migrant. Acknowledging the unusual
incitements that stir the exiled imagination, it suggests that The Quiet Man
Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture
7
was not just a shrewd economic investment, evoking nostalgia among a
large population of Irish Americans, but also a deeply personal project
through which Ford attempted to relocate himself in Irish society. Richard
Allen is alert to the ways in which a specifically Irish-American
experience conditions the representation of Ireland in the film, and he
offers a revealing account of how the Republican politics in Walsh’s story
(and also in the original screenplay) are cautiously suppressed in
production. Even so, the film has the capacity to challenge and unsettle its
viewers’ preconceptions of Ireland, and its sexual politics are far from
simple. For all its apparent romanticising of Ireland, The Quiet Man
continues to offer some powerful insights into the experience of exile and
homecoming.
Sarah Neely’s essay (Chapter 7) addresses the practical and creative
problems involved in the adaptation of works of fiction for the screen.
Both Allen and Neely show how political ideas in cinema are shaped and
conditioned, often in unexpected ways, by the structural features and
audience expectations associated with fictional genres such as the love
story, the romance and the thriller. Neely’s study, however, is particularly
concerned with the filmic representation of Northern Ireland and with the
depiction of sectarian tension and political violence in the 1980s. Her
account of the creative challenges involved in the adaptation of Bernard
MacLaverty’s 1983 novel Cal for television and cinema raises questions
that have a far-reaching relevance for current discussions about politics
and film in Britain, Ireland and America.
Making valuable use of the British Film Institute archives, Neely
shows how David Puttnam’s Cal began life as part of Channel Four’s
‘First Love’ series and how the adaptation was shaped by the producer’s
desire to make a film that was both politically sensitive and widely
accessible. At the same time, she suggests that the novel’s use of a highly
focalised and interior narrative created additional challenges for the filmmakers. Her essay generates new critical readings of both the novel and
the film, but it also prompts more general reflections on how
contemporary film might achieve an appropriate balance between the
claims of specific local cultures and the lure of universal appeal.
The musical score for Cal was composed by Mark Knopfler and the
score for the later adaptation of Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb (1986) was
composed by Van Morrison. A comparative case study of the two scores
leads Peter Mills, in Chapter 8, to ask some fundamental questions about
competing models of Irish musicality in film. What are the signifiers of
Irishness that film-makers seek? How is Irishness conveyed in music? Are
there ways of representing Irishness beyond the traditional melodies and
8
Introduction
time signatures now globally recognised and consumed as ‘Irish music’?
As well as providing an exemplary instance of a new mode of Irish
Studies informed by developments in the study of film and popular music,
Mills’s essay also gives a fresh impetus to the main areas of enquiry in this
book: the imagining of Ireland, the relationship between memory and
identity, the articulation of belonging, and the experience of exile and
homecoming.
The music of Van Morrison is fertile ground for Mills’s research.
Paradoxically, Morrison’s most eloquent articulation of Irishness has
come through an inarticulate speech of the heart. If his songs are
indubitably Irish, they also draw deeply on a well-established American
jazz and blues tradition. Mills offers an informative and illuminating
account of the uses of Morrison’s music in film production, looking at
both specially composed instrumental scores and routinely licenced
adoptions of his work. The essay includes a revealing account of
Morrison’s collaborative work with the German film-maker, Wim
Wenders. If Morrison’s music lends itself exceptionally well to film,
though often through covert rather than overt Irish stylings, it is also, in
itself, a cinematic art, habitually drawn to imaginative depictions and
transfigurations of the landscape in both Northern Ireland and the
Republic.
Much of the power and appeal of Van Morrison’s work is generated
through a complex sense of belonging, a simultaneous attachment and
disavowal that finds expression in repeated images of homecoming and
exile. Ambivalence and uncertainty become the distinguishing
characteristics of a displaced and disenchanted Irishness, often competing
with some ostensibly ‘pure’ or ‘prior’ Irishness. In the work of Sinéad
O’Connor, ambivalence and disenchantment are carried to extreme and
controversial lengths. Tony Purvis’s essay (Chapter 9) considers her work
as ‘performance’ in the broadest sense, giving critical attention to her
speeches, her activism and her appearances on chat shows, as well as her
music. At the same time, it asks what theoretical perspectives might prove
most amenable in seeking to understand the cultural significance of an
artist who, on both the Irish stage and the global stage, has often seemed
elusive and indefinable.
Purvis’s chapter explores some strange and intriguing Irelands of the
mind. It shows how O’Connor has appropriated Irish myths and legends,
but has also transfigured them as part of a continuing attempt to
understand the past and to come to terms with a nation that has, itself,
been dramatically transformed in recent times. If O’Connor’s work
appears to mourn the fading icons of an island that has already ceased to
Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture
9
be, it also imagines Ireland’s possible futures. Cultural memory, in this
respect, is not passively received, but forms the basis of a creative
challenge to contemporary Ireland. In the process, O’Connor has herself
been figured as an icon, though often in negative terms. Purvis shows how
O’Connor has been variously represented in the tabloid press and in
internet articles, and he claims that there is a brighter political dimension
to her work than her apparent pessimism and irritability seem to suggest.
The image of Sinéad O’Connor singing ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’
provides an appropriate point of transition to Willy Maley’s provocative
essay on W. B. Yeats (Chapter 10). Maley cleverly undermines the
conventional view of Yeats as the presiding genius of the ‘Celtic Twilight’
by presenting a comically complicating picture of his relationships with
Scotland. Observing that studies of Irish culture have not given sufficient
attention to the shaping influence of Scotland, and noting how IrishScottish relations confound the simple orthodoxies of both historical
revisionism and post-colonialism, Maley offer some snapshots of Yeats
and Scotland: Yeats’s father reading Scott, and his grandfather reading
Stevenson; Yeats and Hugh McDiarmaid out on the tiles in Dublin; Yeats
trying desperately to recite the poems of Robert Burns for Ezra Pound; and
Yeats dressed in Connemara cloth manufactured in Scotland.
Much of the impulse behind Maley’s lively chapter comes from
Yeats’s short essay ‘A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for having soured the
disposition of their Ghosts and faeries.’ Here, Yeats makes a striking
distinction between the freely operating and uninhibited imagination in
Ireland and the rigidly prescribed and religiously suppressed imagination
in Scotland, telling his Celtic neighbours: ‘In Scotland you are too
theological, too gloomy . . . you have burned all the witches. In Ireland we
have left them alone.’ Maley maintains that Yeats, like Joyce, arrived at a
negative and pessimistic view of Scotland and that this perspective derived
essentially from his despairing vision of the Scottish legacy in the north of
Ireland. If Maley succeeds in complicating Yeats’s Irish credentials by
drawing attention to the Scottish undercurrents in his work, he also shows
how the ‘vexed connection’ with Scotland remains a challenge more
generally for the development of Irish Studies.
In the penultimate chapter of the book, Alison O’Malley-Younger
considers the complex issues of race, place and nation in Brian Friel’s
2005 play, The Home Place. Friel is well known for his memorable and
moving exploration of Irelands of the mind, and for his vivid dramatic
recreation of moments of political transition and identity crisis in plays
such as Translations (1981) Making History (1989) and Dancing at
Lughnasa (1990). In The Home Place his main focus of interest is not so
10
Introduction
much on the grievances and aspirations of the nationalist community as on
the sense of alienation and longing for home that is deeply felt among the
Anglo-Irish ascendancy. The play is set in Ballybeg Lodge in Donegal,
one of the big houses traditionally associated with the ascendancy, and its
events take place in the shadow of political developments in the 1870s,
including the activities of the Land League and the Home Rule movement.
O’Malley-Younger draws attention to the ambivalence and uncertainty
that emanate from the title of The Home Place and inform the play at
every point. Drawing on theories of how cultural identity develops in
relation to the individual and communal realisation of heimat or
homeland, she shows how Friel’s work might be understood in relation to
romantic nationalist ideologies of home that were prevalent in the period
in which the play is set. As in earlier plays, Friel dissolves the hardened
certainties that form around ideals of nationhood and shows how identity
is the product, not just of clearly demarcated geographies and genealogies,
but of far less tangible materials, including stories, dreams and memories.
‘Irelands of the mind’ has an immediate and compelling relevance for
Seamus Heaney, who has written so revealingly about ‘Englands of the
mind’ in the poetry of his near-contemporaries, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes
and Geoffrey Hill. Heaney’s acute sense of the way in which language
both describes and recreates particular landscapes is amply borne out in
his own creative practice over a period of nearly fifty years. Since the
publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1968, Heaney’s imagination has
been both intimately engaged with Ireland and strangely deracinated. As
political violence intensified in the north, Heaney’s imaginative stance
was increasingly that of the internal exile or inner émigré. One of the
characteristic features of his work has been its compulsive need to revisit
its own distinctive Irelands of the mind, returning to these places both as
historical and geographical actualities and as intensely subjective and
imaginative locations.
In the closing chapter of the volume, Stephen Regan considers
Heaney’s response to the I.R.A. ceasefire in August 1994 and asks if the
peace process has opened up new directions and new perspectives in his
poetry. The chapter draws extensively on Heaney’s public lectures and
literary journalism, as well as on a wide-ranging selection of his poetry,
including District and Circle (2006). The focus, however, is on two
groups of poems associated with significant places in Heaney’s
imagination: Tollund and Toome. Heaney’s perpetual revisiting of these
places is seen to be closely related to the processes of reconciliation in his
recent work. Regan argues that Heaney’s preoccupation with memory and
Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture
11
his sustained intertextual experimentation make his recent work ‘postceasefire’ in more than just a chronological sense.
Together, the essays in this volume explore the many different Irelands
that have been celebrated and castigated in songs and stories, plays and
poems, guidebooks, newspapers, films and radio chat shows. Ireland is the
serene and gentle place depicted in travel writings in the nineteenthcentury, but it is also the forbidding place of political violence and
partition. Often, the image is recognisable enough, and sometimes it might
even prove to be historically precise. In many instances, though, what
proves to be most striking in modern culture is the strange disjuncture
between image and actuality, or the strange autonomy with which the
image seems to glow, and we are then left contemplating the sobering
lines of late Yeats:
Those masterful images because complete,
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street?
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can . . .
Yeats’s lines are a chastening reminder of the humdrum realities that often
lie beneath the greatest cultural achievements, but they are also a
testimony to the resilience of the imagination and its capacity for renewal
and rejuvenation. If the essays in this book record the persistence and
durability of some commonplace images of national identity, they also
gesture optimistically towards new Irelands of the mind.
CHAPTER ONE
‘WILDS OF IRELAND’:
TOURISM AND WESTERN TERRAIN
IN THE LATE-NINETEENTH
AND EARLY-TWENTIETH CENTURIES
KEVIN J. JAMES
While there has been extensive research on how cultural and political
movements in late-nineteenth-century Ireland developed and deployed
images of the land and the peasantry, the analysis of how rural people and
landscapes were mobilised in the promotion of mass tourism has been
much more limited.1 As mass tourism grew, the state, local development
The author wishes to thank Dr. Richard C. Allen and Professor Stephen Regan for
their helpful comments, and also Dr. Glenn Hooper, Mary Immaculate College,
University of Limerick, for his valuable feedback.
1
Spurgeon Wakefield Thompson, ‘The Postcolonial Tourist: Irish Tourism and
Decolonization since 1850’, unpublished University of Notre Dame Ph.D. thesis,
2000; Glenn Hooper, Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760-1860: Culture, History,
Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) is one of several valuable
historical analyses of tourists and travel writing in nineteenth-century Ireland; see
also his broad survey of travel writing: ‘The Isles/Ireland: The Wilder Shore’, in
Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 174-90. Other useful papers
appear in Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor (eds), Tourism in Ireland: A
Critical Analysis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), and in Jane Conroy (ed.),
Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on
Travel and Literature, National University of Ireland, Galway, November 2002
(New York: Peter Lang, 2003). The post-partition period is explored in Eric G. E.
Zuelow, ‘“Ingredients for Cooperation”: Irish Tourism in North-South Relations,
1924-1998’, New Hibernia Review 10, 1 (2006), 17-39. Among research aids are
the bibliography by Glenn Hooper (ed.), The Tourist’s Gaze: Travellers to Ireland,
1800-2000 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001); John P. Harrington (ed.), The
Tourism and Western Terrain
13
associations, industry bodies, railway companies and other organisations
marketed the Irish countryside as a site of excursion. In and after the
1880s, these groups began concerted efforts to open rural Ireland to largescale tourism, expanding the infrastructure of railways, hotels, golf links,
and tourist sites. They developed strategies to coax tourists to Ireland and
to structure their recreational time and travel in the holiday-grounds of the
‘Emerald Isle’,2 hoping that more visitors, especially from Britain and
America, would travel throughout the country, and that expatriates might
also bring capital with them to aid the tourist industry’s development.3
Through promotional campaigns, rural cultures and terrains were
commodified as amenities to be marketed and consumed. This study
explores links between two elements of this process: the construction of
western tours in travel material, and the production of ‘vernacular’
handicraft in rural districts. It is part of a wider project exploring the
business history of tourism and tourist marketing in Ireland which focuses
on how routes through the island were produced and popularised for
tourist consumption.
Letters from the West of Ireland
Journalists and other writers offered their perspectives on the
attractions of rural Ireland in published travelogues that often appeared in
English Traveller in Ireland: Accounts of Ireland and the Irish through Five
Centuries (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1991); Brian Ó Dálaigh (ed.), The Strangers
Gaze: Travels in County Clare, 1534-1950 (Ennis: Clasp Press, 1998); John
McVeagh (ed.), Irish Travel Writing: A Bibliography (Dublin: Wolfhound Press,
1996). The study of Irish tourism has largely focussed on contemporary issues:
see, for example, Ullrich Kockel (ed.), Culture, Tourism and Development: The
Case of Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994); Barbara O’Connor
and Michael Cronin (eds) Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity (Clevedon:
Channel View Publications, 2003); Nuala C. Johnson, ‘Where Geography and
History Meet: Heritage Tourism and the Big House in Ireland’, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 86, 3 (1996), 551-66.
2
Tours in the Emerald Isle (Dublin: Thomas Cook and Son, 1895).
3
The Times, 6 September 1884. The development of tourism in nineteenth-century
Scotland offers a useful comparator. See Alastair J. Durie, Scotland for the
Holidays: Tourism in Scotland, c.1780-1939 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003);
Katherine Haldane Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770-1914:
Creating Caledonia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), and Katherine Haldane, ‘“No
Human Foot Comes Here”: Victorian Tourists and the Isle of Skye’, Nineteenth
Century Studies, 10 (1996), 69-91.
14
Chapter One
newspapers and periodicals.4 Tour guidebooks complemented them by
fashioning itineraries for leisure travellers to follow, and by drawing
visitors’ attention to less-travelled districts of the country. Though these
were two different genres of travel writing, employing markedly different
narrative strategies,5 the travelogue and the tour book can be profitably
paired in the study of the historical representation of tourist space. They
both proposed ‘gateways’ to Irish terrain which was depicted, in a variety
of discursive frameworks, as both wild and inviting, foreign and familiar,
savage and benign. As a genre, the newspaper travelogue examined in this
analysis – Alexander Innes Shand’s ‘Letters from the West of Ireland’ –
straddled the boundary between tourist guide and traveller’s narrative.6
Shand was both a ‘tourist’ embarking on a journey that encompassed
famous routes and landmarks, and a ‘traveller’, venturing farther afield to
experience, and recount, the delights of Ireland ‘off the beaten track’.
Moreover, in his narrative he made explicit overtures for tourists to follow
travellers into these wilder places, and incorporate them within the tourist
gaze.7 In this respect, Shand did not represent himself as an ‘anti-tourist’,
or denigrate mass tourism; rather he advocated the extension of
commercial tourism to virgin terrain in Ireland, punctuating his vivid
descriptions of landscapes and peoples with frequent exhortations for
tourists to follow him into the ‘wilds’ of Ireland’s West.
While the autonomy of tourists’ perspectives on, and experiences in,
Ireland must not be understated, the growth in tourist traffic in the latenineteenth century, and the development of a broad range of amenities for
mass tourism, such as tourist routes and guidebooks, demand that we ask
how the public identification of tourist paths through western space
influenced the ‘consumption’ of rural Ireland as a site of recreational
travel.8 They guided visitors’ encounters with, and interpretations of,
landscapes and people; they mapped out physical routes through the
4
Several accounts that appeared in newspapers were also later published in a
single volume. See, for instance, ‘Irish Times’ Tours in Ireland (Dublin: Irish
Times Office, 1888).
5
Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (London: Routledge,
2002); Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (eds), Perspectives on Travel Writing
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). For a good case study of the guidebook as a form of
travel literature, see David Gilbert, ‘“London in All its Glory – or How to Enjoy
London”: Guidebook Representations of Imperial London’, Journal of Historical
Geography, 25, 3 (1999), 279-97.
6
See James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the
Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
7
The Times, 11 September 1884.
8
See John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (2nd edn. London: Sage, 2001).
Tourism and Western Terrain
15
island, and offered perspectives on people and sites in the countryside.
While neither uniform in content nor adopted by the tourists without
critical mediation, they charted paths for travel and promoted ideas of
region, race and culture.
The West’s geographic and cultural diversity lay at the core of an 1884
travelogue written by Shand. His account of a tour through the West was
published in eighteen instalments as ‘Letters from the West of Ireland’ in
The Times, and was subsequently compiled and published in a single
volume to reach an even wider market.9 Shand’s accounts are rich in
detailed descriptions of local land systems, agriculture, and urban
industry; here his descriptions of people, landscapes and tourist amenities
are the focus of attention. A Scottish lawyer, novelist and journalist,10
Shand wrote that many areas in Ireland did not fall under the tourist’s
gaze, as excursionists to the Emerald Isle tended to follow well-worn paths
to long-established tourist sites. ‘English visitors and great numbers of
Americans who are dropped or picked up at Queenstown by the Atlantic
liners hurry off on flying trips to Kerry or Connemara’, he lamented, ‘or
else they rush northward to the neighbourhood of the Giant’s Causeway’.11
Sometimes travellers were cautioned that high expectations of such wellknown sites risked disappointment. Black’s 1877 guide to Ireland, for
instance, noted that, ‘from the over-strained laudation, and the multitude
of paintings and engravings that have been produced of these justly
celebrated lakes [of Killarney], the tourist is apt to form too high an
estimate of their beauty’,12 and opined that while the rocks bounding the
shores of Muckross and the Lower Lake, and surrounding mountains were
grand, they lacked the extent and ‘sublimity that distinguishes the lochs of
Scotland’.13 But if the lakes of Killarney were, in most observers’
estimation, amongst the most popular destinations for tourists in Ireland,
less visited sites offered bold beauty and discomfort in equal measure, and
9
A. I. Shand, Letters from the West of Ireland, 1884, Reprinted from The Times
(Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1885).
10
W. B. Duffield, ‘Shand, Alexander Innes (1832–1907)’, revised entry by H. C.
G. Matthew, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/36037 (accessed 17 January 2006).
11
The Times, 26 August 1884.
12
Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Ireland, Illustrated with a Map of Ireland and
Several Plans and Views (15th edn. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1877), p.
186.
13
Ibid.
16
Chapter One
glimpses into an ‘authentic’ western indigenous culture unadulterated by
commercial tourism, racial mixing, or ‘modernisation’.
Bounding the West
Hitherto, the study of how Ireland’s West was portrayed in the latenineteenth century has largely been the province of art and literary
historians. They have explored depictions of ‘western’ landscapes and
culture in key works of fiction, biography and visual art, in which it was
defined primarily by an imagined boundary between Anglicised Ireland
and its rural Celtic ‘frontier’.14 In these media, the West frequently denotes
the last ‘wilds’ of Ireland. Most scholarship emphasises the distinctiveness
with which the region was invested, the importance attributed to the West
as a repository of indigenous Irish culture, and the influence of the
ideology of primitivism on these processes.15 Yet, however prevalent these
ideas of the West were in contemporary documents, and however critical
14
Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘The Peasant at Work: Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry
and Life in the West of Ireland’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 13 (1997), 143-51
and ‘Landscape, Space and Gender: Their Role in the Construction of Female
Identity in Newly-Independent Ireland’, in Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner
Robins (eds), Gendering Landscape and Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2001), pp. 76-86; Elizabeth Frances Martin, ‘Painting the Irish
West: Nationalism and the Representation of Women’, New Hibernia Review, 7,1
(2003), 30-44; Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Synge and Irish Nationalism: The
Precursor to Revolution (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002); Gregory
Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001); Tricia Cusack, ‘A “Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads”: Irish
Nationalism and the Cottage Landscape’, National Identities, 3, 3 (2001), 221-38;
Anne Oakman, ‘Sitting on “The Outer Skin”: Somerville and Ross’s Through
Connemara in a Governess Cart as a Coded Stratum of Linguistic/Feminist
“Union” Ideals’, Éire-Ireland, 39, 1-2 (2004), 110-35; John Wilson Foster, ‘The
Aran Islands Revisited’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 51, 3 (1982), 248-63;
John Wilson Foster, ‘Yeats and the Folklore of the Irish Revival’, Éire-Ireland, 17
(1982), 6-18; John Wilson Foster, ‘Certain Set Apart: The Western Island in the
Irish Renaissance’, Studies, 66, 264 (1977), 261-74; William L. Daniels, ‘AE and
Synge in the Congested Districts’, Eire-Ireland, 11, 4 (1976), 14-26.
15
Cusack, ‘A “Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads’’’; Angela Mehegan,
‘The Cultural Analysis of Leisure: Tourism and Travels in Co. Donegal’, Circa,
107 (Spring 2004), 58-62; Catherine Nash, ‘“Embodying the Nation”: The West of
Ireland Landscape and Irish Identity’, in O’Connor and Cronin, Tourism in
Ireland, pp. 86-112; Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Kathleen Fahy, ‘Rural
Tourism and Cultural Identity in the West of Ireland’, in O’Connor and Cronin,
Tourism in Ireland, pp. 233-57.
Tourism and Western Terrain
17
they became to a range of political projects and even to the definition of
Irish nationhood, definitive boundaries of the western region were elusive.
Travellers’ accounts used a broad range of fluid, subsidiary spatial
categories as frameworks for representing western Ireland, including ‘the
South-West,’ ‘the North-West,’ Connemara, Joyce Country and the
Donegal Highlands, and ascribed varying levels of wildness to these
districts.
Alexander Shand described some areas, such as Bloody Foreland in
Donegal, as places of untamed landscapes and undiluted peasant culture.16
The broader political importance of such representations was signalled by
fierce debates over the survival of rural families and by ethnographic
studies seeking to identify and document disappearing indigenous cultures
situated in the ‘heart’ of the western Irish countryside. Indeed, this view of
western districts as repositories for pure folk traditions – and pure races –
informed seminal studies of Ireland in the twentieth century.17 In more
recent scholarship, the idea of a western ‘Irish peasantry’ with durable
traditions has been critiqued,18 though its importance in structuring ideas
of rural (and urban) Ireland in the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries has been acknowledged. But from the perspective of many
travellers, journeys westward offered no uniform encounter with
landscapes or peoples, no single undifferentiated ‘peasantry’, and no
common tourist experience.
16
For a contemporary discussion of Irish regions, see Ullrich Kockel, ‘“The West
is Learning, the North is War”: Reflections on Irish Identity’, in Kockel (ed.),
Landscape, Heritage and Identity, pp. 237-58.
17
E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957);
Conrad Maynadier Arensberg, The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study
(New York: Macmillan, 1937); C. M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family
and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940).
18
Joep Leerssen, ‘The Presence of the Past: Peasantry, Community and Tradition’,
in J. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and
Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork
University Press, 1996), pp. 157-223; Edward Hirsch, ‘The Imaginary Irish
Peasant’, PMLA, 106 (1991), 1116-33; Ulrike Spring, ‘Imagining the Irish and
Norwegian Peasantry around 1900: Between Representation and Re-presentation’,
Historisk Tidsskrift, 80, 1 (2001), 5-99; Claudia Kinmonth, ‘Rags and Rushes: Art
and the Irish Artefact, c.1900’, Journal of Design History, 14, 3 (2001), 167-85.
For a particularly robust critique of traditional ethnographic and literary
representations of the West, see Patrick Sheeran, ‘The Idiocy of Irish Rural Life
Reviewed’, The Irish Review, 5 (1988), 27-33.
18
Chapter One
Paths to and through the West
Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travel guides used a range of
physical, cultural and other markers to identify western terrain. Travellers
accessed and journeyed through western Ireland by several means – often
following paths created by railway companies that developed hotels and
excursion packages and played a key role in promoting leisure travel in
Ireland.19 Accessing the West by railway lines that traversed Ireland from
points east provided a framework for narratives in guidebooks and
personal travelogues that portrayed the westward approach as a
progressive departure from Anglicised, urban Ireland (and Britain).
Steamers bound for the Clyde, the Mersey or westbound for America
sometimes touched down in the West as a first point of contact with the
island, and in season there were steam services from Scotland to parts of
the North-West, but most travellers journeying to the West followed an
overland route. Murray’s Handbook, for instance, offered readers ten
proposed itineraries in Ireland, ranging from one week to one month, and
all commencing in Dublin. Doorways to the western country varied.
Guidebooks’ paths westward to ‘holiday-ground’ by rail, car and steamer
charted a course marked by structured ‘stages’, beginning with departures
(usually from Dublin or Belfast) and then by approaches to, and arrivals
in, the West – signalled by a stop at established termini that served as
regional gateways, which offered accommodation, organized excursions,
and other services geared towards commercial tourism.20 Travellers to
Donegal and the North-West were encouraged by the Northern Counties
Railway to regard Londonderry as the regional gateway, while the
Midland Great Western Railway’s path followed a line running from
Dublin through Mullingar and Athlone to Galway, often with a further trip
to Westport, where Shand lamented that the Railway ‘drops you . . . then
you have to shift for yourself’.21 In the mid-1890s the line extended its
reach to the coast with a line to Clifden. The Great Southern and Western
Railway (G.S.W.R.), in contrast, trumpeted south-west routes to Killarney
by way of Waterford and Cork. Sometimes routes to or within western
areas were branded to heighten travellers’ interest and assist in their
promotion. The ‘Prince of Wales’ route, for instance, ushered tourists by
rail from Cork to Bantry and then by coach to Killarney, via Glengarriff
19
See, for example, Tours in Ireland (London: Walter Hill for the Irish Railways,
1905).
20
See John Cooke (ed.), Handbook for Travellers in Ireland (5th edn. London:
John Murray, 1896), pp. 40-4.
21
The Times, 11 September 1884.
Tourism and Western Terrain
19
and Kenmare, and, from 1897, steamers on the ‘Duke of York Route’
plied the Shannon between Killaloe and Banagher . But most guides to the
West began with a ‘departure’ from London, where, following breakfast
and taking the railway and steam service from Holyhead, readers of the
Ward, Lock, and Co. guidebook to The Donegal Highlands were promised
they could arrive in Dublin for tea or Belfast for supper, before venturing
farther afield.22
Few independent travellers through the West followed precisely the
same path. Some toured extensively along the coast; others journeyed
inland: Shand took steamers, cars and railways, and often appraised the
terrain for walking (in Gweedore he wrote that walks through the boggy
ground were less enticing than in Scotland).23 The publication of bicycle
guides also gave travellers an alternative to walking, hiking, coach, rail
and steamer. By the late-nineteenth century most guidebooks offered
routes for cyclists – often covering hundreds of miles. Almost all whose
tours aimed to ‘traverse’ the West, by whichever mode of transportation,
described marked variations in peoples and landscapes. Alexander Innes
Shand ‘arranged a tour to embrace some of the most picturesque districts
in the wilds of the West’.24 In commenting upon the area in which his tour
began, he suggested that it had not at first figured on his itinerary, but ‘I
had been told that in the outlying Peninsula of Inishowen there is coast
scenery almost as stern as any in the kingdom, while it is certain that it is
seldom visited by tourists.’ Thereafter, much of his narrative of the NorthWest constitutes an exhortation for travellers to follow his path. Shand
followed a route that began in Londonderry, then took him through
Donegal, the district around Loch Erne, from Sligo to Ballina, then to
Westport and the ‘wilds of Connemara’, through ‘Joyce’s Country,’ down
Loch Corrib to Galway, then to Ennis and Limerick, journeying over
water and land to Killarney, and ending the tour at Bantry Bay.25 The tour
was punctuated by a variety of small day-excursions. Writing in Buncrana,
northern Donegal on 21 August 1884, he wrote of Derry as the ‘entrance
to a wonderfully romantic district’ that was more easily accessible than
many travellers assumed. In Ireland, he lamented, ‘even more than
elsewhere, the tourist traffic has settled down into regular grooves’.26
22
A New Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to the Donegal Highlands, Londonderry,
the Giant’s Causeway, etc . . . ‘Irish Series, 1902-3’ (London: Ward, Lock and
Co., n.d., c. 1902-3), p. 3.
23
The Times, 1 September 1884.
24
Ibid., 26 August 1884.
25
Ibid., 13 March 1885.
26
Ibid., 26 August 1884.
20
Chapter One
Opining that this may have reflected the poor reputation of Irish tourist
amenities, Shand asserted that the discomforts of travel through the
western countryside had been ‘strangely over-rated’.27
There were a myriad of alternative western tours. The Earl of Mayo, a
strong proponent of tourism development, penned a piece on ‘The Tourist
in Ireland’ in 1897 in which he followed a route that began at Euston, and
took him to Dublin via Holyhead. From there he travelled to Bray in Co.
Wicklow, Glendalough, the Vale of Avoca, through Kildare to Cork, along
the Prince of Wales Route to Glengarriff, then to Killarney, ‘the district
which every one who visits Erin is compelled to seek’.28 Thereafter, his
route proceeded northward, ending in ‘the wilds of Donegal,’ Derry and
the north coast. In the popular ‘Through Guides’ to Ireland, the island’s
attractions were detailed in two volumes, each focussed on one-half of the
island divided by a ‘line drawn across the country from Bray and Dublin
through Mullingar to Sligo, including those places’.29 ‘Within these limits
there is a great deal of country which has no attraction for the pleasuretourist’, the guide’s author, M. J. B. Baddeley noted, ‘and, while we hope
not to have omitted any object or place of real interest, we have
concentrated our efforts on those particular districts which may fairly be
called holiday-ground’.30 In the Ward, Lock, and Co. guidebook to The
Donegal Highlands, Ireland was also said to make ‘an ideal holiday
ground, whether one goes north, south, east or west; but the nearer the
coast the better’.31 It was this idea of the West as a recreational region, as a
‘holiday-ground’ full of contrasts with ‘everyday’ space, that served as a
common denominator in guides to western terrain, though each district
offered some new delight for the tourist’s eye, from rugged coastal cliffs
to gentle valleys to the ‘Moorish’ architecture of Galway.
Interpreting Western Terrain:
Peoples, Paths and Landscapes
The quality of tourist amenities in some western districts varied, and
affirmed tourists’ widespread expectations that consumption of the
27
Ibid., 2 September 1884.
Earl of Mayo, ‘The Tourist in Ireland’, The Nineteenth Century, 42, 246 (August
1897), 193.
29
M. J. B. Baddeley, Ireland, Part 1, Northern Counties, Including Dublin and
Neighbourhood, ‘Through Guide Series’ (3rd edn. London: Dulau and Co., 1892),
p. xi.
30
Ibid., p. xi.
31
A New Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to the Donegal Highlands, p. 1.
28