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

2. Historical and Religious Landscape

2 Historical and Religious Landscape k k k k k k Antiquities The ideology of the picturesque involved more than questions of class and power. It also dealt with relationships among the past, the present, and national identity. The British tourists’ search for the sublime and the picturesque also involved them in the social landscape as shaped by history and religion. For example, ruins, secular and ecclesiastical, were an essential part of picturesque tourism, and, as Dr. James Johnson exclaimed in 1844,“Ireland is the Qeld for the antiquary—the land of ruins! there is no country . . . which presents such a variety of antiquities .” Indeed, the exigencies of history had left the island littered with ruins. The wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been particularly effective in reducing abbeys, castles, and tower houses to romantically ruinous states. T. Croften Croker recounted the story of a publisher who asked an Irishman to suggest someone to whom he might dedicate his new print collection of Irish antiquities. “I know of no one more deserving it,” came the answer, “than Oliver Cromwell, whose cannon has made so many dilapidated buildings for you.”Even for those with little interest in the past, the ubiquitous Irish ruin was hard to miss. Lord John Manners claimed that every few miles offered some tumbledown structure, “a church or a cabin, a cas32 tle or a cow shed, a mansion or a mill.” Few buildings were pulled down, he complained; most were allowed to crumble.1 Tourists in search of the sublime and the picturesque did not just view ruins; they experienced them. Ruins were expected to evoke deep emotions, especially a sense of “melancholy.” However, what early modern culture had established as a meditation on the transience of human endeavor threatened to become, by the end of the eighteenth century, a romantic emotional indulgence.2 Isaac Weld, writing in 1807, claimed that “the sight of a monastery carries us back to distant ages, and gives rise to a train of reflection which every mind of sensibility feels a pleasure in indulging.” In 1797 George Holmes savored the emotions he felt as he entered the grounds of Lismore Castle. He described it as “lifting its high embattled towers in a kind of melancholy grandeur, bordering on sadness; the antient avenue, whose tall dark trees shed a gloom over the outer gate-house, gives its neglected front a deeper and more solemn shade.” Approaching a ruined abbey at Adare, County Limerick, Holmes claimed that he “entered the north aisle almost with bended knees, deeply impressed with awe and reverence by the melancholy objects around us.” The place, he wrote, had “a melancholy wildness.”His companion, John Harden, was also moved by the atmosphere of the site: “there is no walking thro’ this venerable pile without feeling a religious melancholy prey on y[ou]r spirits. . . . Bones & Skulls w[hi]ch lay around, some moss grown with age, all conspire to Qll the mind with thoughts far beyond this sublunary vale.”He tried to explore the grounds, but observed: “my mind from some hidden impulse urged me to desist. I felt a chillness creep thro’ my blood tho’ in the noon day Sun.”3 Such passages contain more than a hint of the Gothic. Indeed, Ian Ousby suggests that the cult of the Gothic and the cult of the sublime advanced together, “borrowing from a common pool of language and feeling which helped people Qnd something appropriately exciting, gloomy or frightening about even the neatest ruins or the smallest crag.” Ousby also argues that the ideas associated with the Gothic helped tourists confronting the sublime to transcend fear and discover instead something akin to religious awe.4 Thus, Mr. A. Atkinson, Historical and Religious Landscape 33 admiring one particularly ancient site, gave himself over to the “impressions” of a place “sacred to devotion”: “If the verdant sod, which under the shelter of these venerable trees, I am now traversing with slow and silent pace—If that dark and solemn pile where the awful truths of eternity are proclaimed. . . . If those broken pillars which remind me of the futility of human schemes, of the short lived existence of man, and of the Qnal ruins of creation, do not dispose my mind for contemplation, and prepare it to ascend to Him . . . then my mind must be strangely insensible to its most important interests . . . to contemplations on the future...