Patrick J. Duffy
(Institute of Irish Studies, Belfast, £45)
Clogher Historical Society is arguably the most successful of all the Irish diocesan societies established in the early 1950s. It has the largest membership and for forty years has published an unbroken sequence of the Clogher Record, a journal that has served as a model for other societies. As a front-runner amongst local history groups in Ireland, it is no great surprise that the Clogher society has broken new ground in co-producing the country’s first diocesan atlas.
But, as its name suggests, Landscapes of South Ulster is much more than an atlas; it is an overview of the historical geography of a region that stretches from the Atlantic ocean to within a few miles of the Irish Sea, encompassing all of County Monaghan, most of County Fermanagh, part of south Tyrone, a single parish in south Donegal and with seven townlands of County Louth thrown in for good measure! From Inniskeen at its eastern extremity to Bundoran in the west, Clogher has thirty-eight Catholic parishes, and it is a series of maps of these that forms the centrepiece of this ambitious project.
Previous articles by Patrick Duffy on the evolution of estates in Counties Monaghan and Cavan provide the basis for the wide-ranging introductory section. We are taken on a journey in time, from evidence of early human settlement, through the Early Christian and medieval period, to the aftermath of the plantations, the population explosion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on to the decline that began with the Famine and continued until relatively recent years. Duffy traces the emergence of territorial units and cultural landscapes, with reference to the people who helped shape those landscapes and were, in turn, shaped by them.
Parishes are still vital components in the popular consciousness of rural Ireland and Landscapes of South Ulster places them centre-stage. In sketching the evolution of parish boundaries, Duffy draws on Catholic, Church of Ireland and state sources and, to a lesser extent, on the Presbyterian Church which is congregation rather than parish-based. But he also deals with other territorial units such as ballybetaghs and civil parishes which emerged, by and large, from the pre-plantation parish structure.
The townland is the basic unit of all these territorial structures. In the face of attempts by the Northern postal authorities to disregard townlands as addresses, Duffy’s is a powerful argument against the encroachments of misguided ‘modernisation’. Stressing the topographical and cultural importance of the townland, he laments the speed with which the names of sub-denominations, whether large parts of townlands or even field-names, are disappearing from memory as our intimacy with the rural landscape is eroded. On the wider level of the parish, he cautions against the removal of focal points (churches, post offices, pubs, etc.) which provide a focus for community identification. His view of Clogher is surely applicable elsewhere in Ireland.
The introductory section could stand as a publication on its own—and might profitably be reproduced in an accessible format for schools in the diocese—but Duffy’s book goes further in producing a series of maps and a topographical account of each parish. The colour maps, by Maynooth cartographer, Jim Keenan, show each parish by townland, overlaying a copy of the 1:50,000 maps published by the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland in the early 1980s. The process of verifying each map—sometimes in the face of conflicting claims by local clergy—partly explains why the project, begun in 1986, has only now been published.
Side by side with the maps are commentaries gleaned from a wide range of sources; eighteenth and nineteenth-century travellers, the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of the 1830s, the records of the Irish Folklore Commission in UCD and the published works of a host of creative writers and poets; William Carleton, William Allingham, Pat McCabe, Patrick Kavanagh, Eugene McCabe and Evelyn Conlon, to name just a few. In addition, the text is punctuated by visual perceptions, including those of artists and cartographers of other eras.
Taken together, these perceptions, and Duffy’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject makes Landscapes of South Ulster an unapologetic celebration of place and of community. In addition, the inclusion of a section on sources and an extensive index which lists present and former townland names, is of immense value for future research in this region. Measured against this, the instances of errors that I came across (and there are some), are hardly worth mentioning. That criticism aside, Landscapes of South Ulsteris a valuable and pioneering work. If the £45 price tag is outside your range, make sure that your local library orders a copy.
Brian MacDonald