Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures

Environmental history faces particular challenges in the context of a national story that has most often been told in terms of “a battle for the land” behind which lay a yet more evocative “battle for the soil.”¹ Recently, we have seen efforts to disrupt the dominance of land-based national histories from the twentieth century with a new attention to oceans and coasts.² But how do we join political to natural history, and what role can be played by current inhabitants of Ireland’s coastlines? This report outlines some of the ways in which cultural history can speak meaningfully to environmental debates on the future use of the oceans by offering a case study that combines humanities and STEM methods in an exploration of the contested coastline of west Cork.

The cultural heritage of our coastlines is rich but elusive: a record of human encounters with land and sea that is deeply felt and experienced yet often described as elusive and intangible. Inherently intricate, fluid, and changeable, coasts are often understood in disjointed ways and addressed differently by science and humanities researchers. As Michael Chiarappa and Matthew McKenzie suggest in the journal Environmental History, the success of such conversations depends on our ability “to engage in a level of ‘shared authority’ across disciplinary boundaries” and on a further dialogue—an “often delicate and evolving relationship” with coastal communities themselves.³

The team behind the project Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures developed a methodology to bring to life the rich physical, cultural, and symbolic heritage of the west Cork coast. This interdisciplinary collaboration between STEM and humanities researchers was funded by the Irish Research Council between 2015 and 2019 with the aim of developing an approach that can be applied to other natural and historical environments.The project investigated the biological, cultural, and historical context of the southwest coast of Ireland from 1700 to 1920 and used the findings to prompt a fuller public understanding of current environmental priorities. By advancing an interdisciplinary understanding of this coastline, the project forms a link between cultural history, scientific research, and environmental priorities while communicating a sense of shared identity and fostering ownership of maritime heritage. In linking the research skills of literary and cultural history with those of marine biology, geoinformatics—defined by Ehrlers (2003) as “the art, science, or technology dealing with the acquisition, storage, processing, production, presentation, and dissemination of geoinformation”—and digital curation, the project joins up aspects of the maritime environment that are often disconnected in modern debates.

Deep Maps responded to needs emerging from both humanities and the biological and environmental sciences. In the case of the former, the environmental humanities have posed urgent new questions about the scope and scale of human interactions with the environment as represented in literary and other texts; while in the case of marine biology, scientists are increasingly aware of the need to deepen and enrich their apprehension of marine environments via a more nuanced sense of the histories and cultures of these storied places.

West Cork Coastal Cultures

Our focus was on the rich maritime environment that is found along the arc of Cork’s Roaring Water Bay, from Clonakilty to Bantry Bay, as it is shaped by sea and land and as it is imagined within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poems and drawings. The project chronology begins with antiquarian inquiries and poetic responses to the Cork coast and ends with the start of serious biological field research in this area, when Louis Renouf from University College Cork began visiting Lough Hyne near Skibbereen in the 1920s. While undertaking research for the Ordnance Survey in 1842, John O’Donovan described Cork as being “particularly Irish especially in the mountains and along the coasts.”⁴ Elsewhere in the Ordnance Survey correspondence, however, we find a note about “the first monument erected to the memory of Nelson after the Battle of Trafalgar” at Castletownsend, a reminder that this was a coastline closely involved...