Mapping Ireland and the Irish

These titles – Atlas of the Rural Irish Landscape, At the Anvil: Essays in Honour of William J. Smyth, and Atlas of the Great Irish Famine– are concerned with Ireland and in particular its landscape (in every connotation of the word). Ruminations on the country, both from within and without, frequently return to such a subject. Writing during the early modern English colonization of the country, the English author and colonial administrator Luke Gernon (1620) observed the “tender grasse” and “champion partes” of the Emerald Isle with an envious and indeed salacious eye:

This nymph of Ireland, is at all poynts like a yong wenche that hath the greene sicknes for want of occupying. She is very fayre of visage, and hath a smooth skinn of tender grasse [. . .] Her flesh is of a softe and delicat mould of earthe, and her blew vaynes trayling through every part of her like ryvoletts [. . .] Her breasts are round hillocks of milk-yeelding grasse, and that so fertile, that they contend with the vallyes. And betwixt her leggs (for Ireland is full of havens), she hath an open harbor, but not much frequented. She hath had goodly tresses of hayre arboribusq’ comae, but the iron mills, like a sharpe toothed combe, have notted and poled her much, and in her champion partes she hath not so much as will cover her nakedness.

Luke Gernon, A Discourse of Ireland(1620), 349–50

In figuring the country’s topography as female, Gernon’s reflection on the country implicitly invokes a gendered dynamic of conquest, subjugation, and control in relation to the landscape. ¹

More recently, the singer Johnny Cash penned his own reflection during a brief visit in 1955. Titled “Forty Shades of Green,” it corresponds to a well-worn panegyric technique. Concluding his paean to Ireland with the words “I’d sail from Cork to Larne to see the forty shades of green,” Cash (1963) employs the conventional trope of nostalgic reflection. Praising the country’s landscape, its multi-foliate character, and its inhabitants, it differs drastically in tone from Gernon’s description; though separated by three centuries, however, both writers attest to the prevailing attraction of Ireland and the country’s landscape.

The attraction to the landscape exhibited by Gernon and Cash may be attributed to the very nature of the country. As J.H. Andrews – esteemed cartographic historian and one of the leading scholars in the field of the history, development, and impulses of Irish mapping – has observed, landscapes such as Ireland hold a particular appeal, most especially for cartographers. “Islands,” writes Andrews, “have always held a fascination for the map-maker” (Andrews 1997a, 2). This fascination for the map-maker has carried over into people writing about the map-maker. Ireland, as both Gernon and Cash take care to point out, is an island, a physically self-contained “nymph” or “emerald of the sea.” More pointedly, the most eloquent poem on cartography and its practice takes Ireland as its subject. Eavan Boland’s “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,” a reflection on the Great Irish Famine, is one of the most frequently cited poems in scholarly studies of cartography, in spite of its adumbration of the representational limits of the discipline.

Boland’s lyric prefaces The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, a work of not only scholarly but cultural magnitude, greeted by the president of Ireland Michael D. Higgins as a “marvellous achievement” and a “great publishing event.” ²The editors John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and...