An Historical, Environmental and Cultural Atlas of County Donegal

Jim MacLaughlin and Seán Beattie, eds. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2013. xvi and 619 pp., maps, notes, index. ∊59.00, £49 cloth (ISBN 978-185918-494-3).

This is not an atlas in the conventional sense: it does not contain many maps, for example. As many geographical terms are now used promiscuously by a wide range of disciplines, however, this is fair enough: Literary cartography, for example, is a popular scholarly pursuit in literary studies today and the terms maps and mapping have been used in diverse fields. Atlas of County Donegal is an enormous assemblage of scholarship, encyclopedic in scope, by more than fifty contributors covering a geographical territory that is only slightly larger than the smallest U.S. state of Rhode Island. Edited and compiled by a geographer and a historian, its seventy-seven chapters are sorted into broad thematic sections covering environmental issues, the precolonial territory, colonization and changing society up to the twentieth century, the making of the modern county, as well as cultural traditions, art, literature, and architecture. Its contributors range from the scholarly to the local historian and writer. It is the latest in a series of publications by Cork University Press that focus on the Irish landscape—the first of which was the highly popular Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Aalen, Whelan, and Stout 2011).

Located on the edge of Europe, the island of Ireland is washed by the wide Atlantic and bathed in persistent wet westerly winds, and Donegal is very much on the wet and windy northwestern shores of Ireland. A recurring issue is Donegal as the “forgotten” county, located as it is as an outpost of the Republic virtually cut off by the statelet of Northern Ireland. Most of its principal road communications with the rest of the Republic run through Northern Ireland. Although the editors in the introduction reflect on the observations of travelers to the county from the seventeenth century—who highlighted its wild and sublime landscapes—it is also true to say that because of the county's geographical location since the partition of the island in 1920, it was ignored by many visitors to Ireland. As MacLaughlin (p. 341) says, impoverished Donegal had few of the “canonical artifacts or iconic buildings” to attract the discerning traveler. Indeed, eighteen articles on Ireland through the twentieth century by National Geographic magazine, an influential shaper of popular opinions on landscape and place, rarely visited or mentioned the county: Of its hundreds of photographs on Ireland, there are only two from Donegal.

The county's rocky coasts and mountainous interior contrast starkly with its eastern lowlands—which were the object of Protestant colonial settlement in the seventeenth century. The chapter on landed estates and gentry landscapes and lifestyles highlights this division, which was stitched together by hiring fairs transferring surplus labor from the poor western outposts to the largely Protestant farmers of east Donegal and Derry. The relative poverty of the county and its remoteness in the twentieth century have meant that much of its landscape of small fields and hedges and tree clumps was spared the transformations that came with modernization elsewhere in the better endowed regions of Ireland. Patrick McKye's memorial to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1837 (p. 224) listed the pathetic material possessions of a community in the impoverished western districts: among 4,000 people there were:

one cart, no wheel car, … no resident gentlemen, one plough … twenty shovels, thirty-two rakes, seven table forks, ninety three chairs, two hundred and forty three stools, … twenty-seven geese, three turkeys, two feather beds, eight chaff beds, two stables, six cowhouses, no bonnet, no clock, three watches, eight candelsticks ….

Donegal was the original laboratory for Evans's (1939) seminal paper on rundale settlement that is revisited here by James Anderson. In many cases, these communal farm clusters were ecologically and structurally appropriate for the landscape and environment of west Donegal. Their removal and replacement with squared individualized fieldscapes was part of a process of land reform encouraged by nineteenth-century landed elites, which in many cases accelerated emigration out of Donegal and Ireland and was frequently resisted by local communities.

In an eclectic collection of essays on a local space such as this, there is sometimes a tendency toward exceptionalism—highlighting as unique characteristics that are shared by the much broader Ulster or Irish cultural landscape. This has generally been counterbalanced by a number of essays by the editors serving to contextualize the county's experience in Ireland and beyond. There is no doubting the “northern” or Ulster character of this Irish county as the editors emphasize in the introduction, and the engagement of the county with a much wider social and cultural world embracing Scotland and the Ulster colony from the early seventeenth century, as well as maintaining links with Scandinavia, Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands in terms of natural and human landscapes.

The atlas is enlivened by a range of high-quality microcase studies focusing, for example, on social change in Glencolumbcille in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and inshore fishing traditions and history among coastal communities that lost out to the land-based family farm ideology of the new nationalist elite at the turn of the twentieth century. There are essays on historical and contemporary agriculture. Tony Varley summarizes the challenges facing the small farm, former peasant periphery in face of rationalization and the drive toward productivism in the past half-century. Donegal's narrow-gauge railways were subsidized by the state in the late nineteenth century to stimulate development in the impoverished west but ultimately only resulted in shop goods pouring in and rural population draining out. Enhanced accessibility deepened cultural impacts, especially as illustrated by the retreat of the Irish language. English, it was said, “quickly follows the good road.” The Irish language held on tenaciously in the poorest, remotest districts of the county—seasonal migration to Scotland helping retention of language and population in the rocky western outposts—and Irish still survives as a community language “on the periphery of a periphery to this day.” And of course the impact of the Great Famine is explored, including a curious essay on Donegal's role in the “demise of the American Indian.”

The Atlas of County Donegal is copiously illustrated with a variety of historical and thematic maps, contemporary paintings of landscape and people, and superlative photographs of landscapes and wildlife, as well as of people. Especially notable are the historic photographs of emigrants on board ships for America. Indeed emigration, “a major diagnostic feature” of the county that echoes throughout many of the chapters in the book, has been intrinsically geographical in linking the northwest of Ireland to urban centers of the world economy. In many parts of this poor Irish county, “families raised young adults for little else than the emigrant trail out of the county” (p. 265), which as MacLaughlin points out, might have fostered political stability in an otherwise volatile, conservative, class-structured, and patriarchal society. Significant numbers of young women especially have emigrated for generations, draining rural areas of their womenfolk and destabilizing their demographies.

One notable feature of many of the photographs of contemporary landscapes is the evidence of scattered randomly dispersed settlement of rural bungalows along the coast, many of which are holiday houses today. Donegal's landscape has been negatively impacted by incoming settlers from urban centers in Northern Ireland, which has intensified during the peace and Celtic tiger boom periods between 1995 and 2007. The Irish countryside is a contested space generally and the editors challenge the “uncritical adoption of a technocratic ideology that justified rapid social development, construction projects and economic transformation” at significant cost to local community and environment (p. 25).