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12 Topographies of Folk Commemoration The history of Ireland must be based on a study of the relationship between the land and the people. J. C. Beckett The Study of Irish History Folk history was associated with localities, and the traditions of folk commemoration that it recalled were embedded in the landscape, which, as Vansina noted, could serve as a “powerful mnemonic device.”1 In the 1930s there were people all along the route of the Franco-Irish insurgent army, from Kilcummin to Ballinamuck, who could point out to folklore collectors exactly where they believed the rebel army had passed and could identify sites of local military encounters. For the people of Connacht and the north midlands, the French invasion was not an abstract episode in a remote past but a vital part of the heritage of their district. In some cases, communities that were not on the officially recognized map of the campaign felt excluded and claimed that sideforces passed through their locality. A pupil near Kiltimagh in county Mayo wrote for the Schools’ Scheme the textbook version of the army’s route, which “every schoolboy knows,” but he also insisted that “some of them must have passed through Kiltymagh,” though he was aware that “the authorities” did not mention his neighborhood.2 Just as natives of the Columbian Andes “will interpret the past as they pass by those topographic sites in which historical referents are encoded,”3 Glassie showed that an Irish community’s historical consciousness was grounded in references to the landscape so that “in place the person is part of history.”4 Yet the topography of remembrance did not simply chart spatial coordinates in a physical reality. By setting experiences in the landscape, traditional narratives reflected a “sense of place.” As Kent Ryden observed in a North American con- ( 208 ) text: “regional folklore encapsulates and transmits the intimate and otherwise unrecorded history of a place; it reveals the meaning of a place to be in large part a deeply known and felt awareness of things that happened there.”5 Halbwachs recognized the importance of literary representations of landscape as reflections of “collective memory,”6 and Simon Schama has shown how mythic meanings have been attached to landscapes throughout history.7 Irish traditions pertaining to landscape have an ancient pedigree. Dindshenchas Érenn (commonly known as dinnseanchas), the large body of medieval toponymic lore written in metrical verse and in prose, constituted, in the words of the Gaelic scholar Robin Flower, a “kind of Dictionary of National Topography .”8 The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature notes that this corpus “reflects a mentality in which the land of Ireland is perceived as being completely translated into story: each place has a history which is continuously retold.”9 It has been pointed out that oral traditions of places were often distinct from those found in written sources.10 The geographer and archaeologist Emyr Estyn Evans advocated that the “personality of Ireland” could best be understood through an interdisciplinary “trilogy of regional studies,” which would examine “the total physical environment ” (habitat), “the written record of the past” (history) and “the unwritten segment of human history” (heritage).11 Raphael Samuel described the built environment as a “palimpsest on which an alternative view of the national or local past is inscribed.”12 Similarly, Kevin Whelan, echoing the géographie humaine of the French Annales school, described landscapes as “communal archives, palimpsests created by the sedimentation of cultural experiences through time.” He suggested that a landscape can be seen “through the eyes of those who made it” and interpreted as “a democratic document from which can be recuperated the history of the undocumented.”13 The geographer J. B. Jackson coined the term “vernacular landscape” in reference to “territory of an impoverished and illiterate population with no written history, no written laws or records, and no documented title to the lands it occupies,” as opposed to the “political landscape” of ruling classes (crown, aristocracy, clergy, etc.).14 An exploration of vernacular landscape in Ireland can offer insight into the mental geographies that were vividly evoked in folklore accounts and illustrate the vital relationship between local communities and their surroundings.However, this term, which was conceptualized with an English and German experience in mind (referring specifically to Deutsche Rechtsalertümer, Jacob Grimm’s 1828 collection of local law and customs), needs to be adapted to accommodate local conditions. Looking at Irish poetic and narrative traditions about places, the cultural critic Pat Sheeran and the Topographies...

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