How easy it is to lose sight of what is historically invisible – as if people lived only history and nothing else.
—John Berger, Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
We drove to Boora again on St Stephen’s Day, wanting to feel the wind on our faces. My brothers and I had bought my mother a new camera for Christmas, and she was itching to test it out. My father had a new watch that tracked his movement, so he was updating us regularly on his step count. When we arrived, shortly after lunch, my aunt and her partner were in the car park, just about to leave. We’d all had the same idea: get out of the damn house. It wasn’t a particularly nice day, but it wasn’t raining either.
We stopped periodically as my mother framed photographs: the reeds at the edge of a lake, an abandoned peat train rusting on its side, my father and I, posing on the gravel path cutting through the forest. Strangely, she never checked how the photos came out after she took them. It was only when we had almost completed our lap around the park that she noticed the camera’s focus had been set to manual the entire afternoon. Every photo she’d taken, even those she’d spent several minutes getting just right, were blurred and fuzzy.
It was getting dark when we came back around to the entrance. My father decided to take the long way home. We turned down a narrow road I’d never noticed before, and the view from the back seat was as untamed as anything I’d seen in this part of the country. The boundaries between bog and farm seemed to break down entirely. Houses, sheds, and farmyards appeared out of nowhere, perched on the edge of a blankness beyond. It was as if they’d carved a little bit of calm out of the bog many years previous, and had spent all the time since being attacked and undermined by feral wilderness. Whatever civilising sense they had was porous and partial. Nothing grew straight. Every bush and tree was a mass of tangles and nothing man-made remained square for long. Fences and gates were crumbling, and the breeze block walls of tin-roofed sheds sagged into the soft ground at incongruous angles. The road itself was one long twist punctuated by jagged potholes. The leafless branches of hardy roadside trees reached out towards us, desperate and lonely. This was Turraun.
The wild stretch ended as suddenly as it had taken hold. We came around a sharp corner only to be presented with a row of completely typical country bungalows, all of them very much like our own. They had gravel drives and verdant front lawns, pools of tidy green and white set in relief against the vast, brown-yellow badlands. They were so neat and orderly, I couldn’t believe it. Toys in the yard, goalposts in the garden, Christmas lights in the windows – everything was utterly normal. I wondered aloud how they had even managed to sink proper foundations for houses like these; the ground must have been shifting beneath them. Despite appearances, we were still very much in the bog, and these clean, modern houses could surely extend no more in the direction from which we’d come lest they collapse and be swallowed up entirely by the wet and twisted wilderness. Still, my mother told me that a friend of hers lived in one of these houses, and that when she had visited our house a few months before, she’d said, God, you’re really in the sticks out here.
—
Turraun was always a wasteland, but it was also the first place in Ireland where people successfully mechanised the archaic manual labour of peat-harvesting. At the time, turf was burned in homes all across the country, and moss peat was processed for use in gardening and horticulture. If you could produce enough of it – and then transport it to the cities, where people actually bought it – you stood to make a decent amount of money. The challenge was drying it quickly and consistently; more moisture in the peat meant heavier, less-effective fuel and compost. Traditionally, peat was dried in the open air, but that took weeks and was subject to the whims of the weather. If the peat could be dried indoors, by use of an oil-fired burner, then the opportunities for speed, efficiency, and reliability were vast.
The first person to coherently apply the logic of automation and scale to that process was a local man named Farrell, who set up shop in Turraun around 1904. The only picture I’ve seen of Farrell shows him as an older man, thin, with a long face and sharp, knowing eyes staring into the middle distance. He had worked on the bog for years before he struck out on his own and secured the finance needed to buy machinery, build factory sheds, and hire men. However, the business was not as profitable as he’d hoped, and he got into considerable debt. The operation was soon bought out by one of Farrell’s creditors, an ex-army officer named Colonel Dopping. There were several retired military men making inroads into the peat industry in Ireland at the time. Ordering around impoverished workforces, the regulation and improvement of foreign land – maybe this was the closest men like Dopping could come to replicating their experiences in the further-flung corners of the Empire. Dopping himself had been a part of the colonial administration in India, and he brought to Turraun an Indian servant who lived with him on his houseboat on the river Brosna.
I don’t know anything about this servant beyond the fact of his existence, but ever since I learned of him, I’ve been as fascinated by his story as the locals of Turraun must have been a century ago. I imagine the servant was a man – would the alternative have been a scandal? Something about the intimacy of the houseboat and the distance they had travelled together suggests more than a simple master–servant relationship between the two men. Dopping must have relied on his servant, and trusted him.
I imagine the servant waking first and stepping across the cold boards of the houseboat as he lights the fire in the small iron stove, fills the tin kettle and leaves it to slowly boil. He does this without thinking, as he has for many years. The narrow interior of the boat is simple and bare; there is not much to do most days. Dopping emerges in shirtsleeves when the kettle begins to sing. The servant brings him breakfast. Dopping drinks his tea and, for a few minutes after eating, smokes his pipe absent-mindedly. There is no talk. Soon Dopping dresses and leaves for his concern on the bog, while the servant is left to clean away the plates and pans. He might have been confined to the boat and forced to pace its claustrophobic quarters until Dopping’s return. But it’s not like he was going to run away. He was hardly inconspicuous, and it was a long way home.
—
From what I can tell, this part of the world was historically unwelcoming to outsiders. In Helen Sheil’s account of the area in the two decades before the Famine, she tells the story of people from across the Shannon being chased out of town in case they drove up the price of potatoes. She describes how people who let strangers stay in their houses would be taken to task by gangs of local vigilantes. The reason for this suspicion and hostility was simple: there wasn’t enough food, work, or land to go around. Outside of the Protestant landowners, who dictated both rents and wages, nobody had a pot to piss in. They lived in one-room hovels, pushed further and further into the bogs by rising rents and the need for more productive land use. Why have peasants on your best land when you could have much more valuable crops or animals? This is probably why my grandparents’ house is where it is: the cheapest, most marginal land, reserved for the poorest, most marginal people.
Those who worked that land in the 1830s had neither the time nor the money to travel and experience other places. Sheil mentions how, from the road into the town, you can see the Slieve Bloom mountains on the horizon, twenty miles away – many people would never even have gone that far. These were people with a maddeningly limited sense of the world, a locality hemmed in tight by the forces of poverty, hard labour, and imperialism. This is one of the most painful elements of Sheil’s account: the sense of interminable decline and festering neglect leading to a hard, astringent narrowness. People turning against each other, turning against the world. The title of Sheil’s book: Falling Into Wretchedness.
A place does not cast off that kind of history lightly. Towns like ours still bristle at the sight of difference, and change comes slowly if it comes at all. The details may differ over the years, but the forms remain terrifyingly static. Sometimes it seems like everything has been inherited. The restrictions can be suffocating, the air of ‘normality’ noxious. This feeling was depressing to me as a teenager, and it’s still confusing now. I want to live with all the comforts of tradition and familiarity, but with none of the narrowness, none of the stricture and fear. I want that to be possible, but I don’t know how it could be. Exasperated and accusatory, I’m left to ask myself an unanswerable question: how could anything improve if those who want change are the first to leave?
—
Foreigners like Dopping’s servant still rarely make their home around our bog, but there is nothing unusual now about people travelling from great distances to visit here. Going to school in Clonmacnois – we were taught to spell it without the ‘e’ – meant observing a year-round stream of tourists coming to see the monastery there, and take pictures of the ruined Norman castle. We were children and these things were just the backgrounds to our days, seen through the fog as we got off the bus in the morning, or gazed at distractedly while waiting for the lunch bell to ring. We were aware of their history, which was drilled into us in class, but these sites never felt of purely historical importance; their story, which was our own story, was still ongoing. Meeting busloads of German and American tourists wandering around was just the ordinary way of things. Sometimes they would come up to the wall of the school and talk to us. Nowadays a large fence separates the children from the visitors, hung with signs explaining that photographing kids is prohibited.
We took it for granted that all these people would travel such long distances to this quiet, cold, out-of-the-way place to see things we saw almost every day of our young lives. My mother, who has worked in the school for almost twenty years, says this idea fascinates the tourists too. They are amazed that the children grow up looking out on such a historical, picturesque landscape. But the familiar is a habit; soon it goes unnoticed, absorbed into the daily pattern of life. This is just as true for children, who have known nothing else, as it is for adults. Sometimes, as my mother parks her car in the school car park, turning at the top of the hill, she looks out over the Shannon, the morning light on the flowing surface of the river, the castle and the monastery all in ruins, and she will stop and think of how lucky she is to work in such a beautiful and unique place. But most days, she says, she doesn’t notice it at all.
—
What began in Turraun at the turn of the 20th century soon became a national industry. The Turf Development Board was founded in 1933, the year my grandfather was born, with the idea of developing the bogs as a national energy resource. With coal proving scarce during the war years, turf production almost doubled by 1945. In 1946, the Turf Development Board became Bord Na Móna, transforming from a private company to a semi-state operation. The first peat-fired power station came online a decade later, and others sprang up all around the countryside. Many miles of narrow-gauge train tracks were laid down. Chugging locomotives carried peat toward tall chimneys in the distance. Men learned how to operate incredible new machinery, which they tweaked and improved based on their particular needs. Generations of experience on the bogs fed into the success of a truly indigenous concern.
For the first time, the Midlands had an industry of its own, and a need for skilled and unskilled labour. Men came from all over the country to live in temporary camps and work long days on the bog. In time, whole villages were built to house them and their families. Farmers could find seasonal work to supplement their farming income. They could train as fitters, welders, electricians, and mechanics. Scientists, architects, engineers, accountants – the Bord had need of them all. For some, it was the difference between something and nothing. For others, getting a job with Bord Na Móna was a lifetime commitment, an opportunity for personal growth and professional development.
I don’t think John Joe had any great plans when he joined Bord Na Móna around 1980. He probably just needed the money. He was almost fifty, a part-time farmer with six children aged between ten and twenty-five. There were many more like him – ordinary people; locals.
The bogs, which for centuries had been a drain on the capacity of local agriculture, were now one of the primary sources of productivity for the area. People who would undoubtedly have left home, and probably the country, in search of work had the chance to stay and live decent lives in their own place. The towns that grew up around the power stations, and the communities who worked on the bog between those towns, were able to support growing families. Those families became teachers, publicans, builders, typists, farmers, grocers, nurses, and factory workers.
—
‘The bog is not for me an emblem of memory,’ writes Tim Robinson, ‘but a network of precarious traverses, of lives swallowed up and forgotten.’ This feels to me like the most accurate and useful encapsulation of what the bog has done and is still doing in the lives of those who live alongside it. The bog is not an endpoint at the edge of the human world, nor a stratum beneath it, but an environment shaped by the ongoing wanderings of people coming in and out of it. To traverse the bog is to beat a path through it, leaving a trail for others to follow, or following those who have gone before. Such a path is always communal; some sense made of the wilderness over time.
The mystery of the bog, and its attraction, lies in the way it both remembers and rejects the paths we make. It is, to borrow Derek Gladwin’s phrase, contentious terrain. Contentious not just in how ambiguous its significance or its habitability may be, but because the bog sometimes appears to have a will of its own, an unpredictable and typically dark force that pushes back against the presence of human life. We walk into it, but the ground springs back behind us, immediately overgrown, as if we had never been. The bog has a life like the rest of us; it changes with us, in response to us, and has its own sense of becoming. The bog, of all things, should never been seen as fixed.
Perhaps this is why Tim Robinson adds that caveat to his description of the bog: ‘lives swallowed up and forgotten’. This constant tension between preservation and obliteration – between meaning and void, presence and absence, silence and sound – this is what defines the experience of the bog. The paths we make in and out of it are always shifting and unreliable. And yet they persist, winding inscrutably through the apparent blankness, inviting yet another pilgrim to thread a way; to pass through, or to sink foundations.
—
Not long before stumbling upon Dopping’s servant, I read Rebecca Solnit’s Book of Migrations, where she describes how every place exists in two versions – exotic and local. ‘The exotic is a casual acquaintance who must win hearts through charm and beauty and sites of historical interest,’ she says, ‘but the local is made up of the accretion of individual memory and sustenance, the maternal landscape of uneventful routine.’
The occasion for these thoughts is a trip through the Burren in Co. Clare. For Solnit, writing in the mid-1990s, the Burren was a place becoming almost exclusively exotic. Thanks in part to the waves of travellers passing through, and in part to the lack of economic opportunity for locals, the balance between individual memory and historicised importance had shifted, more or less conclusively, toward the latter. The attractions of the Burren for the transient tourist and the settling retiree were obvious: a uniquely beautiful landscape of geological and historical value; an old and yet accessible reserve of ‘traditional’ Irish culture; a romantic wilderness of primitive, warm-hearted survival on the edge of the continent; the thrashing ocean at the foot of the cliffs. The draw was less apparent for those who were born and raised there.
When I read that passage, sitting at my parents’ kitchen table some years ago, I immediately began to think of my relationship to home in the same terms. Here, I felt, was a place becoming exotic, though in a manner quite different to the Burren. The Midlands do not have the easy appeal of the west coast. For most people, the heart of the country is a barren expanse to pass through on the way to somewhere else.
I immediately understood Solnit’s ‘exotic’ as a large-scale, communal forgetting, and my home, it seemed to me on that winter evening, was a place in the process of being forgotten entirely. It was a place where the possibilities of life’s endurance were being cut away, a place of purely historical interest. I thought of the houses all around, and I thought of the widows who lived alone in so many of them. Families had been disappearing from here time out of mind – my grandfather was, after all, the only son of five who stayed here; my father, the only son of four to do the same. I couldn’t say whether I, or either of my brothers, would ever really live there again. I felt like the place was thinning out. It couldn’t support the lives it needed to push on, to keep going and stave off a silent collapse. A time would no doubt come when everything that had happened here, everything we had built, all the paths we had taken, would be lost. I resolved to remember, to do the work that might, in some small way, sustain life and routine in this circumscribed locality.
Of course, this is nonsense. I mean, what would I know about what the place needs or doesn’t need? My way of seeing things had little or nothing to do with the reality of the people who live there. My position, not unlike Solnit’s, was that of an interested and concerned observer, sheltered from a process over which I had no influence at all. I could go to the library and read about the history of our area, but I would not live there. I could gather my notes and sketch out theories, but still I could not know what my parents and my grandparents knew. Just recently, sitting at our kitchen table while my parents and two aunts discussed various people who lived around us – their houses, their families, their histories – I was again struck dumb by the depth of their knowledge, the extensive catalogue of names and connections that was threaded through their lives. The only one who was forgetting, really, was me.
The things I had been accumulating – characters like Dopping’s servant; books like Falling Into Wretchedness; phrases like ‘network of precarious traverses’ – were not a part of the lives and minds I considered local. Solnit is explicit: the exotic is history, the local is memory. Sincere and even passionate as it might be, my relationship to home had become a mostly intellectual pursuit. Writing about it was not going to reverse that. I wonder if it is even possible to write entirely from memory, or whether memory is, in the end, a private, unspoken, unspeakable thing. To put something into words at all is to manufacture a distance, a partiality, which is exotic, which turns memory into history. I take Dopping’s servant out of his archival existence and I wheel him about on the stage I’ve set for him, and I do so because he is interesting, because he is exotic, because he is a part of history now, no matter what I do.
I make use of him because I want to believe that even someone so foreign, so other, could become a part of this locality; that he could be woven into the story of this part of the world. I want to hope that this place, these people, would admit such difference into their lives and their ideas of what is normal, and who is local. Solnit calls the idea of nativeness a ‘myth of singularity’, and I want to expand my own version of that myth – to believe that some poor man from the other side of the world – alone and practically imprisoned – could also have called this place ‘home’.
Selfishly, I want to believe that being a local, living in the rut of ‘uneventful routine’, would not dull the exotic charm and beauty of a place. Because I feel like I need both. If I am to be happy, if I am to feel at home, I need both; the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the practical, the familiar and the unfamiliar. And I’m not sure I can have that at home, in the place where I grew up. What causes me to respond to something in a way that feels true, what binds me tighter to the people or places around me, is altogether different than what gave my parents and grandparents a similar feeling. We started out in the same place, but the courses of our lives have been so different. I have lost much of what they had, even as I gained things they never imagined. I have so many choices in life, but I have lost the ability to say: this is the centre of the world. Maybe this is what being local really is – the ability to say, without doubt or any subsequent clauses, this is my home.