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

7. Misreading the Agricultural Landscape

7 Misreading the Agricultural Landscape k k k k k The sloping land recedes into the clouds; Displaying on its varied side the grace Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tow’r, Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells, Just undulates upon the list’ning ear. Groves, heaths, and smoking villages, remote. william cowper, “The Task” Landscapes “are signiQers of the cultures of those who have made them,” Brian Graham suggests in his introduction to In Search of Ireland : A Cultural Geography. “They can be regarded as vital texts that mesh with social, economic and political institutions to underpin the coherence of any society.”1 Reading a strange landscape, however, can be problematic for tourists whose own countryside might suggest quite different“texts.”While tourists seek difference, they also cherish the familiar and become disturbed when they fail to Qnd it in a foreign land. Most of the British travel writers, especially after 1800, assumed a dual task: to awaken their fellow countrymen to the beauties of picturesque Ireland and to help them understand Ireland and its people. As the population of the peasantry continued to grow, feeding the impression of ever-deepening poverty, a sense of contradiction between the land and its people also grew. The fault could not lie in the land, because even bogland—they believed—could be drained and made productive. Ireland’s problems had to lie, therefore, within the 127 character of its people, especially the peasantry. Character and landscape became twin themes in many travel narratives. The sense of contradiction between land and people emerged most clearly when the writers turned their gaze from spectacular scenery to Ireland’s agricultural landscape. Unlike the upper-class theorists of the picturesque, most of the largely middle-class travel writers had no problem mixing utility with aesthetics. They carried with them a template for agricultural appreciation based on the aesthetics of the enclosed rural landscape of southern England. Although this landscape was replicated on Ireland’s best farmland, the visitors were too often struck by the treeless, hedgeless look of many Irish Qelds, not to mention the vast open pastures, cluttered rundale villages, and seemingly endless bogs. Assuming a link between aesthetics and agricultural productivity, the visitors believed that the failings of the Irish character could be read in the condition of the land; “ugly” land was a sign of negligent farmers. We have seen how some British travel writers misread the social landscape of rural Ireland. This chapter will show how some misunderstood the Irish agricultural landscape as well, evaluating both land and people in terms of the assumed superiority of British, particularly English, agricultural models. In particular, the visitors looked for, and frequently missed, what were for them signiQers of aesthetically pleasing , but also highly productive, agricultural landscapes: trees, hedgerows, enclosed Qelds, and “proper” villages. k The Want of Trees Just as tumbledown cottages or ragged clothing signiQed poverty, the absence of certain features also disturbed the visitors. For example, British tastes assumed that a proper rural scene had to include trees, and not just any trees. Richard Colt Hoare complained that the Scotch pines that had been planted in Killarney, being too uniform in shape, “but ill accords with scenery so wild and natural.”As David Lowenthal Misreading the Agricultural Landscape 128 and Hugh Prince point out, “A special aspect of English taste for the picturesque is a decided preference for the bushy-topped, broadleaved , deciduous trees,”as opposed to conifers. But British travelers in Ireland generally complained about the scarcity of trees of any type. In the 1770s Arthur Young described a location near Londonderry as“the most picturesque of any place I have seen. . . . the scene wants nothing but wood to make it a perfect landscape.”Almost forty years later John Gough complained that“the great desideratum, in most of the country parts of Ireland . . . is that of timber, and well planted hedges. . . . The want of [trees] gives the most fertile parts a naked and most unpleasing appearance.” Riding in the vicinity of the Slieve Bloom mountains between Phillipstown and Mountmellick in what is today County Laois, Jonathan Binns described the area as “uncommonly dreary— not a tree is to be seen, except a cluster of poor Scotch Qrs, bent by the unobstructed blasts.”2 Sir John Carr related the story of an American who, upon landing in Belfast and surveying the treeless landscape, was heard to remark...