Journeys in Ireland

Literary Travellers, Rural Landscapes, Cultural Relations

Martin Ryle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351924795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume offers a reasoned critical account of a wide range of travel writing about rural Ireland. The focus is on work by English travellers who visited Ireland for pleasure, from the 'scenic tourists' of the post-Romantic period to Eric Newby in the 1980s. Ryle also discusses accounts by American and English anthropologists, as well as writing by Irish authors including J.M. Synge, George Moore, Sean O'Faolain and Colm Tóibín. The materials reviewed and discussed here, including many books which are now difficult to find, offer illuminating and sometimes entertaining evidence about the development of tourism. Ryle also shows how the discourses and practices of pleasurable travel have intersected with and been marked by the dimensions of power and proprietorship, hegemony, and resistance, which have characterised Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English cultural relations over the last two centuries. Journeys in Ireland will interest all those concerned with the literature and history of those relations, and will be an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers and students concerned with travel writing and tourism with and beyond these islands.

Chapter 1
Prospects and Perspectives

Ireland has many hills and mountains that rise quite sharply from low-lying country, and it is often possible to enjoy fine prospects from a ridge or col. From the inland edge of the Burren in north Clare, at the top of the quiet lane that rises from Glencolumbkille House up onto the limestone plateau (Ordnance Survey half-inch series sheet 14, Galway Bay: ref. R32 99), you can look east over the corridor of low ground, across where the road from Ennis runs past the lakes up through Gort to the plain behind Galway, and so to the hills which culminate to the north in Slieve Aughty. On a fine summer evening with the sun behind you in the north-west, you will find the prospect bathed in light, and it will be possible to pick out many landmarks with the help of the map. Indeed it may seem that, as in an aerial photograph, you enjoy the kind of panoramic vision which map-makers themselves apparently command. The contrasts of relief and geology and land use and vegetation stand out; and you may have the illusion that much of the detail is there too, so that if somehow you could bring a magnifying glass to bear on what you saw, every field and wall, even every field gate, would spring into focus.

In reality, of course, you enjoy no such panoramic or panoptical prospect. One object hides another: there is much that you cannot see even within the horizon of vision. The map, a rather detailed representation made with painstaking labour down there on the ground (Irish Ordnance Survey maps still derive in part from the nineteenth-century surveys described by J. H. Andrews in A Paper Landscape), is no more than an approximation. Nor is this just a matter of scale. Tim Robinson, whose Stories of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) must surely be among the most fine-grained literary representations ever made of any terrain, and who makes maps too, has written of the 'several years of walking' he spent covering the ground of Connemara in pursuance of 'an absurdity, an adequate map'. He adduces mathematical and geometrical theory, demonstrating that shorelines, which you might think could be properly represented if only the cartographer worked on a sufficiently large scale, consist actually of an infinite series of 'self-similar' shapes, their 'general characteristics [being] the same, roughly speaking, at all scales from the whole side of a continent down to the margin of a rock pool'. Even down at the rock pool scale, you are left with a Borgesian regress of labyrinthine detours and castellations: applying magnification to the lines you think you see would doubtless reveal them to be made up of further microscopic and submicroscopic detail, impossible to reproduce. No wonder Robinson opens his reflections on the cartographical project by proclaiming the inadequacy of all maps and stating that 'the blanks on the map are indeed its most essential and its most frustrating features' (Robinson, 1994, 12–18).

‘An Adequate Map’

Images of terrains and maps, of a countryside that can be explored but never fully shown, aptly represent the kind of cultural-historical charting I undertake in this book. My material is written representations of Irish rural landscapes, primarily but not exclusively in the writing of English travellers, and I discuss it with reference both to wider social, literary and cultural histories and to historical and contemporary tourism in Ireland. I cover the main lines of development of post-Romantic English travel writing about Ireland, and as I pursue this central topic, I travel into and across adjoining territories: literary studies, ethnography, social history, tourism studies.

I exclude the topographical writing which accompanied and rationalised the English conquest of Ireland, as I exclude pre-Romantic writing in general. My theme is the development of a culture of scenic tourism: a culture born out of Romantic landscape aesthetics (which already prized 'remote' Celtic scenes), and later inflected in a new context of overdevelopment in the European metropolis, depopulation of peripheral rural regions, and discourses of 'tradition' and environmentalism.¹ The texts I discuss, and the comments I make on them, offer evidence and critical analysis of how, since the early nineteenth century, the languages and the journeys of such tourism in Ireland have evolved. The book as a whole reviews some of the larger cultural questions at stake in representations of Ireland made by English literary travellers, and brings those representations into relation with developments in scenic and cultural tourism on the ground, and with other kinds of writing: particularly English writing about the 'disappearance' of rural England, and work by Irish writers travelling in their own country.

Chronologically, the book moves towards the present day. Chapter 2 offers a substantial survey of writings by nineteenth-century English visitors. The later chapters, which have varied thematic and topographical foci, progress broadly, albeit with some anticipations and doublings back, from the literary and cultural revival at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through Independence and the newly inflected accounts which English visitors produce in its aftermath, towards the recent period in which a number of authors from the Irish Republic have written travel books about the island of Ireland.

I have chosen to organise my material not just thematically and chronologically, but also geographically: there is a movement (again with anticipations and doublings back) from the west to the north, from the mouth of the Shannon to the Border counties of Leitrim and Cavan where the river rises. This somewhat unconventional dimension of the book's structure seeks to reflect some material aspects of the Irish rural landscape, and reflects also my reluctance to adopt the kind of panoramic perspective which implies that the whole terrain is visible. I write as one more visitor from England, whose exploration takes some of its form from the particulars of an itinerary which may come closely to grips with this or that stretch of the country but which also acknowledges its own partial quality: a traveller only ever sees things from a series of more or less well-placed vantage-points.

In some chapters, I refer to rides and scenes and stopping-off places on this journey upriver along the Shannon, incorporating some account of them into my reflections on the cultural history I am tracing. I made that journey in May of 1997, cycling from Athenry, on the Dublin–Galway railway, southwards to Corofin in County Clare; across to Lough Derg, lowest of the great Shannon lakes; and then up the river, over the bogs of Offaly and the fields of Westmeath and Longford, to Leitrim, Roscommon and Cavan. I draw on what I saw and heard then, and on my many earlier visits to Ireland, where I must have cycled thirty or forty times in the last fifteen years. There is some self-indulgence here, no doubt. I might have resisted the opportunity of cycling once again in Ireland, and of doing so (what is more) in the name of academic research. I might have tried to exclude any record of my travels on the ground and of the pleasures they have given me. Yet pleasure is at the heart of travel and of travel writing. It has seemed more honest and more useful, as well as more delightful, to make a little room for it here.

The route begins in 'the West', the favoured region of post-Romantic scenic tourists and the heartland of the Celtic nation that was rediscovered, imagined or invented by the nineteenth-century literary and cultural revival; but it ends in country less celebrated by literary travellers (though well known to coarse anglers), the lakes and drumlin hills and rushy fields between the Shannon and the Erne. This territory, much more than the now busy west and south-west, still offers summer visitors the empty green spaces which have been one of the key attractions of the Irish 'tourist product'. The recently reopened Shannon–Erne waterway, its restoration partly funded by the European Union, is the centrepiece of a new tourism marketing strategy which highlights (and may in time compromise) the unspoiled quality of this region, and which aims to create new employment to reverse or at least stem the emigration which has made it so 'empty' – and thus so potentially attractive as a 'green' tourist destination.

The contradictory nexus of economic hopes and environmental fears centred on the project of 'green tourism' provides one theme of my final chapter, and this reflects a major thematic emphasis of the book as a whole. From the 1930s on, and more especially in the period since the Second World War, Ireland's 'underdevelopment' has enticed visitors from crowded England, who have gone there imagining that they will find an escape from what Olivia Manning, in 1950, called 'the harassed outside world ... the cheap-jack vulgarity of "civilized" life' (Manning, 1950, 58). Already in the writings of the Irish literary revivalists the notion that the West offered an antidote or alternative to urban-industrial modernity was a leitmotif; and nowadays, as tourism from Continental Europe grows increasingly important to the Irish economy, that kind of representation has become integral to the 'literature' of the travel brochure. Not that this is a matter merely of representations: however one may seek to deconstruct this notion of the 'unspoiled' and to bear in mind the impress of cultural difference which any such term must bear, the sense of deep rural quiet which you may enjoy in Leitrim and Cavan, cycling round the Arigna mountains looking north to Ben Bulben or lying beside a fire of sticks and watching the sun go down on the shores of Lough Oughter, can hardly be paralleled anywhere in south-east England.

My journey northwards is a journey towards the border. This highlights the second of the book's central preoccupations: the ways in which writing about landscape is implicated, consciously or otherwise, in the cultural politics of nationality. This topic is a recurrent theme in my accounts of particular works and of their contexts. Whether before or after Independence, English travellers in Ireland have had to deal with the sense of being in a country which is foreign, whatever its constitutional status, and which has been caught up, through much of the period I cover, in relations of political and cultural subalternity and resistance vis-à-vis the writers' homeland. In discussing books by Irish writers journeying in their own country, I focus on the ways in which these texts – from the idealised landscapes of Synge's Aran and West Kerry, through the combative anti-British nationalism of William Bulfin's Rambles in Eirinn (1907), and into the post-colonial explorations of Sean O'Faolain, Colm Tóibín and others – have sought to render 'Ireland' in ways that might speak to an Irish readership: even if, in a twist which serves to underline the complexity of Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English cultural relations, many of the books in question were published in London.

These two themes, which might be denoted in the shorthand phrases 'tradition and environment' and 'national identity', recur in most of my chapters, the chapters themselves (as will appear in due course) being devoted more specifically to particular periods, books, writers and topographies. My citations of and quotations from primary texts are abundant, since I aim to orchestrate a polyphonic chorus, or debate, juxtaposing voices from different places, times and cultural milieux. My aim is to give readers a sufficient sense of the materials on which I draw, and to provide signposts for their further exploration, while also bringing them into an intelligible form in terms of the thematic concerns I have outlined. Although I have chosen not to engage directly with current critical and scholarly debates, I have of course drawn on the extensive secondary literature: the bibliography records my debts.

Among primary texts, I have already indicated that writings by post-Romantic English visitors to Ireland are my major concern. It is only in this field that I attempt a comprehensive coverage, although I also offer readings of several travel books by Irish authors. In chapter 3, I give an account of ethnographic work, by English and American scholars, on the West of Ireland: it will be seen that its characteristic emphasis on 'tradition' gives this a kinship both with the perceptions of twentieth-century literary visitors from England, and with the tropes of the revival. I also cite, here and later, a number of English travel books and other writings that lament the destruction of 'rural England'. In charting the cultural-geographical project of the Irish literary revival, I discuss George Moore, as well as J. M. Synge, and have chosen to return repeatedly to their work, in the hope that readers not familiar with it will nonetheless gain some sense of how these two Anglo-Irish writers can provide case studies of the themes of place and displacement which are central to this book as a whole. James Joyce and Flann O'Brien appear as iconoclasts; but although I refer in passing to other literary work, I make no attempt to deal, even synoptically, with representations of landscape or rural life in the work of Irish writers generally. Implicit in the approach which the book takes is the conviction that whatever value travel writing may have as empirical evidence about the terrain it describes, it is itself primary evidence about the cultural relations which it necessarily represents, because it instantiates and embodies them. Travel writing, in other words, is to be relied on not as an account of the places described but as a record of how those places have been seen.

Writers whose chief concern is with scenic tourism work mainly with elements or aspects of the physical and cultural landscape, but the image that they produce draws on consciously felt emotion (elation, awe, anxiety, boredom) and on a repertory of cultural responses which may be less conscious. I think it is important to stress the material reality, what Tim Robinson calls 'the objective ground' (Robinson, 1994, 13ff.), both in itself and in the contrasts it may provide with visitors' home countries. However, responses to landscapes form and are formed by cultural discourses which are ideal rather than material – and collective as well as individual. Sublime scenes, the high mountains of Kerry or the austere bogs of Connemara, elicit feelings which may be expressed felicitously, which are no doubt sincerely felt, but which are only felt and expressed as they are because of the Romantic and post-Romantic taste for that kind of wild scenery. More recently, travellers' perceptions have owed less to high Romanticism, with its vocabulary of the sublime, and more to the later, related taste for 'primitive' lifeways and 'unspoiled' country; but again the development of that taste is a cultural shift which goes beyond the responses of individuals and predetermines their modes of seeing. Many English visitors to Ireland have felt entitled and impelled to write about people as well as places, to look aside (as John Barrow did in his Tour Round Ireland in 1835) from 'the oft-proclaimed physical beauties ... the cultivated and embellished landscapes of the "Emerald Isle" ' and to give some account of 'the general and external appearance and condition of the great mass of the population' (Barrow, 1836, preface). Such accounts are offered within a changing but always powerful context of political relations. Although different writers respond differently, each response is a mediation and reflection of political and cultural histories which individuals did not make and cannot unmake.

The travel writer's text is multiply determined, then: by the intrinsic nature of the physical and cultural scenes that are encountered, by conscious writerly intentions, by the wider cultural-historical setting. As it happens, we can acquire some preliminary sense of this multiplicity, and of the kind of reading it may provoke, in connection with the flat east Galway landscape near Athenry, which has been written about by more than one visitor, and which will make a good starting point for our journey.

At Athenry: Reading Travel Writing

The most popular route for travel writers in Ireland has been a clockwise tour, starting sometimes at Dublin and sometimes in the south, and then taking in the celebrated scenery of the Atlantic coast. This western coastal route, originally determined by the Romantic taste for the sublime, has retained its popularity into the present century. Some version or variation of it was followed by H. V. Morton in In Search of Ireland (1930), by Sean O'Faolain in An Irish Journey (1941), and by four writers – Robert Gibbings, Charles Graves, Garry Hogg and Olivia Manning – who came to Ireland immediately after the Second World War, when English tourism in the country was at its zenith.² Manning's title, The Dreaming Shore, prefigures her Atlantic itinerary: Cork and Blarney, Glengarriff, Killarney, Tralee and the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula, Limerick and Clare, Galway city, Connemara, Westport, Sligo and Donegal. Almost the whole of this route i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Maps
• 1 Prospects and Perspectives
• 2 Knowledge, Amusement and Unprofitable Tours
• 3 Ethnographers, Travellers, and 'Decline' in the West
• 4 Into the West
• 5 'There is no Country in England'
• 6 Peddling the National Landscape
• 7 'A House Behind a Wall'
• 8 Border Crossings
• 9 An Idyll?
• Bibliography
• Index
• Place Index