CorkHeritage

PhD  Title: A River of Memory: Landscape, Identity and Remembering in the Lee Valley, Co.Cork

 

My research  is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I am investigating the relationships between landscape and memory within the context an Irish river valley. The work is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences as part of a Government of Ireland Scholarship. The work will provide insights into the processes of identity formation and place-making and the evolving human experience in remembering and forgetting in the context of recent transformations in Ireland.

 

Central research questions:

 

Memory is often understood as a social and personal activity that plays a key role in expressing and binding group identity and forging people’s relationship to place, region and nation.  In moment of rapid social changes, as has been witnessed in Ireland in the last decade, the conditions through which people engage with their localities though memory, individually and collectively, remains an important cultural issue with key implications for questions of heritage, preservation and civic identity.

 

Within this context, and drawing upon recent debates in historical geography and associated disciplines, this research will consider the ways in which collective and individual memory evolves and mutates in association with social and spatial change. More specifically, the research will investigate the relationships between landscape and memory, investigating the ways in which places are experienced, sensed, acknowledged, imagined, yearned for, appropriated, contested and identified with. Through these explorations of the meaning of landscape, the research will provide insights into the processes of identity formation and place-making and the evolving human experience in remembering and forgetting. Thus at the heart of the study is a core research question which seeks to understand the conditions and processses which shape the co-production of people and place in the context of ongoing transformation and change.

 

 

Amongst the most important aspects of the historiography of memory, has been the challenges made to the idea of grand narrative as the backbone of history. A principal outcome of this work has been a renewed appreciation and revalorization of the vernacular, the spoken word, the landscape and the social topographies of everyday life.  Drawing upon the legacy created by Nora (1989) and Halbwachs (1992), this study will investigate the individual and collective framing of memory at a range of sites in the Lee Valley.

 

 

From source to mouth, this valley has ‘storehouses of memories’. The valley is one of the most beautiful and complex landscapes in Ireland and has been witness to human presence for over 5,000 years. Landscape is the work of the mind, the construct of the imagination. Landscape at times is strongly connected to personal experiences and memories with some contemporary imagery deliberately evoking the recollection of places experienced, perhaps on travels or during childhood.  In this sense, the research embraces the notion of landscape as an idea. Landscape is not a natural feature of the land but a man-made way of sensing the natural world in the mind. The research will investigate how the landscape is always influenced by specific personal interpretations – what the individual sees and feels. An entire landscape tradition can be the product of shared culture built from a rich deposit of myths, memories and obsessions. Hence, the production of memory is vibrant and continuous.

 

The meaning of memory is rooted in place and people value their emotional engagement with place. People in the valley have a unique understanding of its landmarks, its sights, sounds, smells, its seasons and social organisation. However, values are constantly being buffeted by changes in modern day society. Through understanding the meaning of the memories, the research will philosophize and formulate theory on the strong relationship between people and place, its construction, production, constitution and evolution.

 

 

 

Two methods are appearing so far – Intertextuality and phenomenology (both harnessed to examine the meaning of memories within ruins, memorials, monuments, cultural displays within the landscape of Gougane Barra and Dripsey, Co. Cork)

 

Intertextuality:

 

In terms of intertextuality and in the context of Gougane Barra has a storehouse of narratives and memories. Each memory is linked and enhances each other framing new meanings for each generation that engaged with Gougane as a landscape worth honouring. There is quite a depth to the symbols used by each generation to assert their identity and their place in a wider collective. The symbols reflect national and global histories from the inhabitant of the site, townland derivations, paganism and the advent of Christianity, the legend of St. Finbarre, the building of the ruin, the pilgrim practices, the erection of the early twentieth century oratory, the hotel complex to the ways this site has been written about and represented through a whole range of media. Each human layer combined creates a rich depth of meaning for the place. Aspects such as architecture, art, folklore, history, literature, poetry, paintings, photographs, postcards also forge, illuminate, translate and add to and enrich the complex and vector filled framework of place in Gougane Barra.

 

Graham Allen in his book Intertextuality (2000) observes that all texts are potentially plural, reversible, open to the reader’s own presupposition, lacking in clear and defined boundaries. Texts lack any kind of independent meaning. Even reading is a process of moving between texts. Meaning becomes something, which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext. Intertextuality foregrounds notions of relationality, interconnectedness and interdependence in modern cultural life.

 

Allen (2000) also asserts that the already written and already said can threaten to turn one’s narrative and narrative voice into repetition or previous utterances and previous texts. However with intertextuality, narrative can become charged with intertextual traces of the past, present and the historical periods between the two. A fuller understanding of the chosen studied world can be gained from an intertextual network.

 

Phenomenology:

The summary by cultural geographers such as Crang write that phenomenology is about studying intelligible phenomena –objects just don’t exist but exist at different levels. An object only really becomes something when it is seen in light of its intended uses. There is an intended object as well as a material thing. Places perhaps are not just a set of accumulated data but involve human intentions as well. The idea is that there is more to objects and things than their surface appearance – that there is a depth of meaning – has also been developed to think about the essence of things.

People seem to experience something beyond the physical or sensory properties of place and can feel an attachment to a spirit of a place. The human subject only becomes able to think and act through being in the world. People tend to think and act through material objects. Thus a place is a product of how people interact with it. Existential space is informed by cultural structures as much as peoples’ perceptions – it is a space full of social meaning – this space is defined in relationship to some human experience or task.

John Wylie enters the landscape via local guidebooks but leads the narrative through his own movement through it. He has flagged in his work that self experience of landscape plus landscape theories plus a historical site biography creates a multiplication of experiences and perspectives of a particular landscape. Those aims are in my own thesis. John Wylie also notes that his methodology fills an engagement with texts, embodiment, senses and materialities. He calls his method post phenomenological.

 

My methodology also involves weaving in relevant cultural geography paradigms on landscape and place, identifying relevant literature for specific topics such as ruins and sacred sites and connecting interdisciplinary literature back into ideas of cultural landscapes. Fieldwork analysis is another key element to merge into the overall picture. My methodology in the fieldwork stages used participant observation and other qualitative methods as tools for examining landscape and memory and to build site biographies. Participant observation, flexibly structured interviewing, landscape interpretation and document analysis were used to explore the narratives my fieldsites present and how those narratives are engaged by visitors and residents.

 

 

This chapter is based on fieldwork on the north bank of Inniscarra Reservoir, primarily in the area of Dripsey in mid County Cork. Kansteiner (2002) argues that collective memory could be conceptualized as the result of the interaction among three types of historical factors: the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artefacts according to their own interests. Kansteiner (2002) coins the vocabulary of memory studies to include terms such as “national memory”, “public memory”, “vernacular memory”, and “counter-memory”. This chapter wishes to explore three of Kansteiner’s terms in the case of the field location of Dripsey.

 

 

(a)   National memory and the Dripsey Ambush Memorial:

 

Dripsey Ambush Memorial tends to have a number of levels of study, whether one is talking about the general historical narrative or the story itself to the effects on local and national memory or the meanings of the physical memorial- the obelisk. This section is about material culture and how it can be transformed into sacred objects when serving the goals and needs of any group. Records, memorials, monuments, pilgrimages, re enactments and other concrete and ritual means serve to structure, maintain and reinforce collective memory.

 

(b)   Public memory and the Dripsey Woollen Mills:

Kansteiner  (2002) in his critique on collective memory asserts that collective memories are a form of multimedia collages consisting in part of a mixture of pictorial images and scenes, slogans, quips, and snatches of verse, abstractions, plot types and stretches of discourse, and even false etymologies. They also include statues, memorial sites, and buildings such as Dripsey Woollen Mills. Collective memories exist on the level of families, professions, political generations, ethnic and regional groups, social classes, and nations. These examples indicate that people seem to be always part of several mnemonic communities.

 

(c)    Vernacular memory – Fieldwalks and nostalgia:

 

Shackel (2001) in work on American historical archaeology notes that memories can serve either individual or collective needs and can validate the holders’ version of the past. Heritage connotes integrity, authenticity, venerability and stability. Shackel argues that history explores and explains pasts but it grows ever more opaque over time. Heritage, can according to Shackel, can clarify pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes. Memories give the landscape a working identity and this identity enables them to take the part of the citizen.

 

The preoccupation with local history in local communities involves actors, organizations, networks, conventions, practices, representations, and responses that are amenable to description using ethnographic and historical methods. (Eidson, 2000). Hence understanding local memory requires “a multi-sited sensibility within a particular site, and an ability as Edison suggests “to follow people, conflicts, plots, and metaphors across community boundaries-or at least suggest how this might be done” (Eidson, 2000, p.575). Therefore local history provides both an interpretive framework and a rhetorical repertory, which is systematic enough to serve as a common point of reference and flexible enough to accommodate varying interests (Eidson, 2000).

 

During the Richardson’s field walks in Odessa, histories and places were encountered, sensed, and mapped. Participants sometimes took interested friends or relatives to a “hidden” place. Spaces became places, past epochs came to life, absences became presences as streets frequently or infrequently walked were incorporated into a sense of the city as place. (Richardson, 2005). Walks became about voyaging to the past. While talking history was certainly a major part of a walk, the present always intruded, and indeed, encounters with the past were also encounters with aspects of present social transformations. Walkers’ comments were often framed by a narrative of decay, loss, and degradation (Richardson, 2005). This section explores a fieldwalk with Pat Carroll, a huntsman in Dripsey of a local holy well.

 

 

 

 

This chapter investigates the question of the role of ruins in the production of memory in my fieldsite Gougane Barra at the source of the Lee. What is the role of the ruins in shaping that landscape and its memories? This chapter harnesses Gougane Barra to investigate meanings and the human experience associated with ruins. Accordingly, in the context of Gougane Barra and ruins, this chapter is divided into four core sections:

 

(a)   Ruins and myths:

Fara (1998) argues that ruins on landscapes are re-interpreted by each generation of viewers; they can convey new meanings and new associations far from what the original users had in mind. It is largely through landscape and the artefacts that are part of the landscape that mythic images are experienced. Myths can anchor ruins as important to keep in the landscape (Fara, 1998).

 

(b)   The politics of memory:

The depictions of Gougane Barra are bound up with the politics of memory – that its memories were harnessed for political reasons. Landscape descriptions in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are associated with forces of colonisation.

 

(c)    Ruins, representation and invention:

The scale of importance of ruins also seems to depend largely on society’s response to them, in particular the immortalisation of ruins through the passing down of traditions, through media systems. Both Schama (1995) and Woodward (2001) note that ruins inspire a variety of responses.  Images and representations such as paintings of Gougane Barra constitute a key part in what Schama (1995) constitutes the storehouse of memory.

 

(d)   Ruins and photography:

The paintings of the nineteenth century transform into postcards of Gougane Barra in the early twentieth century. These mnemonic images now present the ruins as a site of construction of genteel tourist space. A site of relaxation, enjoyment and even exoticism is presented. Hoelscher (1998 & 2007) emphasises the heavy visual bias of photographs and their additions to collective remembering. Photographs can be disseminated to a mass audience.

 

 

 

In this chapter, I wish to focus in the non-performance element –the material representation- the meanings within the monuments themselves through personal engagement but primarily an intertextual approach. Studies of landscape have focused beyond the physical or natural world to explore landscape as a meaningful or significant construct of social groups. However, much of these studies focusing on ideas of sacred landscapes have been spearheaded from anthropologists and archaeologists. There is much to learn from such disciplines especially as cultural geographers have principally engaged with ideas of sacredness through religions and their dispersal patterns and meanings. For anthropologists, the landscape seems to incorporate events, people, and places from the past, which are replicated and remembered in the actions movements and relations of those who presently dwell within the landscape (Blain & Wallis, 2004; Loukaki, 1997, Mather, 2003, Moore, 2004 & Tilley, 1996). So in this chapter, there is an attempt to find new ways of seeing the contribution of sacred sites in constructing human landscapes and their intertextuality via the lens of Gougane Barra in County Cork.

In this chapter I wish to address ideas of monuments, sacredness and the intertextual landscape. Tuan (2004) in defining place was particularly concerned with sacred spaces, discussing the ways that in the ancient world landscape were rich in places, which held sacred, religious or mythological significance. In particular a memorial of the past invites reflection, creates a contested space and invites a dialogue. This section explores the monuments bound up with the sacred web of Gougane Barra’s landscape, in particular the pilgrimage cells and the early twentieth century oratory.

 

(a)   Pilgrimage cells complex:

The pilgrimage cells complex seems to be a monument that can mould and facilitate the transmission of ideas. On one level the creator of the pilgrimage cells Fr O’Mahony was a priest. However, he constructed the cells in honour of the beliefs of Christianity and in an effort it seems to revive the early Christian devotional site bound up with the legends of St Finbarre. With those latter ideas Fr O’Mahony on another level became an architect, landscape theorist, practical gardener and artist. The human marks he impressed on the landscape through the pilgrimage cells became a highly personalised view of the world as he viewed it and reveals his attitude towards the merging of religion and landscape. He created a composite work of art, where layered images, frames and views contrived to augment the intellectual, sensual and sacred experience of place in Gougane Barra (Nelsom, 2008; O’Kane, 2004).

 

(b)   St. Finbarr’s Oratory:

The oratory was created in order to have social effects, including producing specific identities. Buildings and landscapes inevitably shape how those entities are experienced, related to, and acted upon. It is a substantial, stone, human-erected construction, much visited by tourists, under official ‘monument protection’; legislation and practices, and sometimes taken as iconic of national identity. It has also gained much press coverage and being exposed to and harnessed by mass tourism (McDonald, 2006).

Other characteristics of the oratory’s sacredness seems to be bound up with elements such as its visual presence even dominance on the pilgrimage island; the design of the architecture and overall meaning symbolism and thirdly the interior symbolism the pilgrim is led through. In terms of the visual presence, the oratory and similar monuments like it in the middle of Gougane Lake can be characterized and coded as extrovert, public and exclusive. Thus, the monuments express dominance, superiority, and visualizations of power. Those who built the monuments materialized their position in society by the choice of the location (Gansum & Oestigaard, 2004).

For a small building, there was an enormous amount of thought and symbolism invested in the new structure. From fieldwork and research, there seems to be two principal representations of thought. The first, which is represented in the exterior architecture, concerns the Gaelic revival of the late nineteenth century and presents narratives and representations from that connecting Gougane to a national memory. The second strand appears in the interior and the narratives here represent symbols of Christianity and connect the Gougane oratory to a global memory.  The influence of the bible on this oratory located in western culture is strong but it also seems many of the themes and contexts have been forgotten about in Gougane Barra and now serve as collective artefacts with no meaning just highlighting the existence of Christianity in the area.

Hoelscher (2003) asserts that landscapes and material artefacts of place-monuments, memorials, and museums anchor memory. Such places as witnessed in places such as the pilgrimage cells and oratory in Gougane Barra are, he notes, like “theatres of memory”. They provide a spatial context within which stories and rituals are performed, enacted, understood, and contested. Such articulations of the past he calls displays of memory. They are also active drivers in producing, shaping, and giving meaning to cultural memory and heritage.

In this chapter, I wish to focus on the performance element and its contribution towards the creation of a cultural geography in the Irish landscape and the associated processes of remembering and forging memories within the landscape itself. This chapter at its heart is concerned with embodiment, cultural displays and ritual their effect on the process of remembering.

The chapter especially focuses on the power of symbolism connected to the act of pilgrimage itself from the act of travelling to and performing rituals at sacred sites. I draw upon literature on the practice of pilgrimage and draw upon antiquarian accounts of practices at Gougane Barra pilgrimage site, Co. Cork. The legacies of such practices are rooted in Roman and Greek times. The experience, knowledge, raison d’être and memory of such practices filtered their way down into the Irish landscape in the nineteenth century and survives in part in the way of life today. Celebrations seem also to be embedded in place and animate, colour and breathe further life into the physical human fabric and historical text of sites such as Gougane Barra as a site of memory. Performance seems to be another conduit for remembering and landscapes memories are transformed through the experience of doing a ritual (Mack, 2004).

 

 Chapter 8- Modern Cultural Performances :

The chapter is bound up with my own personal engagement and the questionnaires I conducted in Gougane Barra. The core of this section explores responses to questionnaires conducted in Gougane Barra exploring reactions by modern pilgrims to the site. From the literature review and responses, I came up with potential research questions for the field site. These questions were open ended and were designed to engage the participant to think about the sense of place within Gougane Barra, its location, the role of landscape in the production of memory and the dynamics and spirit of the place all woven together. The questions were also created using a form of narrative analysis where the participant thinks about inner and outer perspectives on the fieldsite.