Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland

9. Landscape, Tourism, and the Imperial Imagination in Connemara

9 Landscape, Tourism, and the Imperial Imagination in Connemara k k k k k More than any other region, the West of Ireland disturbed British tourists, even while it fascinated and delighted them with its rugged splendor.1 By the early nineteenth century, the popular romantic imagination had come to accept sublime landscape as part of God’s bounty. However, the idea that emotionally inspiring scenery could be economically unproductive seemed a contradiction that fewer British visitors were willing to entertain. This feeling grew as travelers gradually Qltered into the more remote parts of the West during the Qrst half of the century. There they faced a country wild enough to stir the romantic heart, and there, crowded on the costal strips, half-hidden up narrow glens, and pushed onto marginal lands sloping up the mountainsides , lived the peasants whom travelers frequently compared to the savages of Africa and North America. Such poverty could not be blamed on nature, otherwise so profligate in its concentration of splendors along the Atlantic seaboard. Aesthetics could not be at war with economics. Surely moral economy was missing from the western landscape. In The Rhetoric of Empire David Spurr Qnds that such perceptions of a “contradiction” between man and nature constitute a common 162 ingredient in the “colonial discourse.” By aestheticizing the landscape , writers rhetorically separate the land from the natives, whose very poverty stands as evidence of their inability to make the land achieve its potential. Faced with such failure, the metropolitan visitor expropriates the land into his imaginative domain. In Spurr’s words, colonial discourse “implicitly claims the territory surveyed as the colonizer’s own; the colonizer speaks as an inheritor whose very vision is charged with racial ambition.” At the same time, this “proprietary vision” effaces itself by claiming it is a response to “a putative appeal on the part of the colonized land and people. This appeal may take the form of chaos that calls for restoration of order, of absence that calls for an afQrming presence, of natural abundance that awaits the creative hand of technology. Colonial discourse thus transfers the locus of desire onto the colonized object itself. It appropriates territory, while it also appropriates the means by which such acts of appropriation are to be understood.”2 The West of Ireland, especially after the onset of the Famine, seemed to call out to British visitors for redemption. John Harvey Ashworth, author of The Saxon in Ireland, or The Rambles of an Englishman in Search of a Settlement in the West of Ireland (1851), described his feelings as he stood on top of Mayo’s Corraun Hill overlooking Clew Bay: “I could have stood and gazed for hours. The words of Goldsmith were at my heart though not upon my lips: ‘Creation’s heir, the world—the world is mine.’”3 Since Ashworth wanted to encourage Englishmen to settle in the West, thus adding to the growing “Saxon colony” there, his words suggest more than enthusiasm for the picturesque. Envisioning economic development amid Connemara’s wild bogs, the imperial imagination misinterpreted nature’s beauty as a promise of agricultural bounty. For a time picturesque aesthetics overruled the harsh geographic reality of the West of Ireland, inspiring colonial dreams of an agrarian utopia. Landscape, Tourism, and the Imperial Imagination in Connemara 163 k Discovering Connemara Until the 1830s, relatively few travelers ventured into Ireland’s western seaboard. The West was considered wild and uncivilized, its poor roads making access too difQcult for tourists. Nevertheless, what might be called the “myth of the West” had already been born in the British imagination. Discussing John Dunton’s travel narrative A Dublin Scuffle, published in 1698, Joep Leerssen points out that the Englishman was one of the Qrst visitors to Ireland to suggest that the “real” Irish, in all of their “old barbarities,” could still be found in the West.4 Yet over the next century few visitors strayed west of a line that ran from Kenmare, Killarney, and Tralee in Kerry, north through the towns of Limerick, Galway, and Sligo, and then northeast to the towns of Donegal, Strabane, and Derry in Ulster. By the 1830s, however, Kilkee in southwest Clare had attracted Irish people and a few British tourists seeking seaside holidays, and some hardy souls even braved the rough roads into Connemara. It was not until the 1840s, however, that travel in Connemara became routine. Early accounts...