Patrick Kavanagh's Poetic Wordscapes: GIS, Literature and Ireland, 1922-1949

Somebody is moving across the headlands
Talking to himself
A grey thinker.
The Seed and the Soil (1938)
a road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ (1935)
This paper presents the use of Geographical Information
Systems (GIS) as a means to digitally explore
authorial, literary and historical environments from a
multi-sensory perspective. The production of Patrick
Kavanagh’s Poetic Wordscapes has involved the digitization
and literary mapping of historical 1902 Ordnance
Survey maps of Inniskeen parish in County Monaghan,
Ireland, and the townlands of Mucker and Shancoduff.
This regional landscape captured in the writings of Irish
poet-farmer Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) comprised
an imaginative hinterland which he observed, inspired
many of his works:
A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane,
a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of
four small fields –these are as much as a man can fully
experience. As I wander slowly along the over-hanging
hedge that separates my fields from the fields of John
Woods my past life comes vividly alive in my imagination.
Those wonderful days in a world that was only a
couple of townlands and yet was eternal. 1
The GIS visualizations and interactive mappings which
comprise Patrick Kavanagh’s Poetic Wordscapes work
are the fruit of an interdisciplinary collaboration between
the Digital Humanities, Historical Cartography
and Geography and Irish Literary Studies. Humanist
geographers have observed that ‘literature is the product
of perception, or, more simply, is perception,’2 and
long maintained a ‘view of literature as a valuable storehouse
of vivid depictions of landscapes and life.’3 Correspondingly
‘Robert Frost’s New England, Gauguin’s
Tahiti, Hemingway’s Spain [. . . ] are imaginary places in
the original sense of the verb “to image.”’4 Kavanagh’s
literary landscape of Monaghan was both imagistic and
strongly rooted in a farmer’s physical relationship with
the land itself. As the humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
informs us:
the entry of nature is no mere metaphor. Muscles and
scars bear witness to the physical intimacy of the contact.
The farmer’s topophilia is compounded of this physical
intimacy, or the material dependence and the fact that the
land is a repository of memory and sustains hope.5
Landscape depictions in Kavanagh’s poetry and prose of
the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s deeply reflects such a topographical
sensibility. In later life Kavanagh observed:
‘To know fully even one field or one lane is a lifetime’s
experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth
that counts, not width.’6 The vivid images of place in
Kavanagh’s canon originate from the early memories he
possessed of his birth place in the townland of Mucker.
One established, they circle outward to encompass the
fields of Shancoduff and wider drumlin landscapes beyond,
like ripples extending outward upon a pond of poetic
imagination. Kavanagh’s prose style is particularly
suited to GIS visualization and mapping as it inherits the
‘Gaelic bardic tradition of dinnsheanchas (knowledge
of the lore of places)7 and accordingly reflects an intimate
‘geography based on seanchas, in which there is no
clear distinction between the general principles of topography
or direction-finding and the intimate knowledge of
particular places.’8 The base maps utilized in this project
are based upon 1902 revisions of surveys conducted by
the British Ordnance Survey, which first mapped the island
of Ireland between 1824 and 1842 and produced
baseline six inch to one mile maps (1:10,560) charting
the locations of structures, townlands, fields, roads,
streams, as well as Anglicizing Gaelic place names.
Whilst topographically accurate, the first ordnance survey
in the nineteenth century was a political project of
empire and its intent was to create a scale of appraisal,
which would establish the basis for Griffith’s Valuation
of land and property. The 1902 revision maps digitized
to visualize the landscapes depicted in Kavanagh’s prose
are linked to the basic topographical divisions of the
1901 and 1911 censuses: county; district electoral division;
townland or street. Original household returns,
signed by heads of households, provide a window on
the social-economic features of the landscape through
three statistical returns, dealing with religious denominations,
classification of buildings, and out-offices and
farm-steadings. Such an approach has been utilized by
Woods and Shelton (1997) in their investigation of the
geographical patterns of mortality rates in nineteenth
century England and Wales.9 The mapping revisions
published in 1902 and joined with databases containing data from the 1901 and 1911 censuses are commensurate
and reflective of boundaries and topographical features
described by Kavanagh’s account of the social landscape
in the first two and half decades of the twentieth century.
Utilizing overlayering techniques, these attributes
in a GIS system have been geo-coded to features such as
boundary lines and structural points, to reconstruct the
historical dimensions of particular periods and locations
upon the visualized landscape. Digitized maps for Kavanagh’s
Wordscapes were ‘rubbersheeted’ and draped
over a digital terrain model (DEM) created from contemporary
geological survey satellite images of the region.
Such an approach in digital mapping recreates the poet’s
visual perspective and movements over a rural drumlin
landscape. Selections from Kavanagh’s poetry and prose
have been geocoded in real-time, through GPS technology
in text and audio from point to point of inspiration
and provide a 3D model, which recreates his poetic performance
through space, as he farmed his fields, walked
the winding roads of his townland, and participated in
the day-to-day life of his Parish of Inniskeen. A similar
technique allowed Harris (200) to employ moving imagery
to research the loci of ‘sacred space’ associated with
ancient native American burial grounds in Moundsville,
West Virginia.10 The digital interactive maps comprising
Kavanagh’s Wordscape are but one element of an online
literary geography which explores the intrinsic relationship
between Irish literature and place during the first
half of the twentieth century, and are currently being employed
in an ongoing digital humanities project, entitled
A Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922-1949 to visualize
the historic, imaginative and literary landscapes of a
selections of Irish authors, by integrating their performances
as writers in time and space, with the narratological
maps provided by their texts. Though many web
based portals in the digital humanities consist of online
databases, directories, or repositories of scanned text,
this project’s nexus between Irish Studies and Historical
GIS is thematically different and methodologically a
strong one,11 because GIS’s ability to visualize and store
attribute, spatial and temporal information, allows the
integration of visual, textual and numerical data related
to Irish Studies within a spatial frame of reference. This
project provides a means for users to visualize the unique
relationship between writers, their works and the influence
of place, history and culture upon Ireland’s literary
production in the early twentieth century. The project
question being posed, presented and facilitated by GIS is
to undercover through the aegis of writers, their locales
and their works the heterogeneous nature of Irish identity
and its relation to place during the early twentieth
century. As Irish poet and Nobel prize winner Seamus
Heaney has observed:
The usual assumption, when we speak of writers and
place, is that the writer stands in some directly expressive
or interpretative relationship to the milieu. He or she
becomes a voice of the spirit of the region. The writing is
infused with the atmosphere, physical and emotional, or a
certain landscape or seascape, and while the writer’s immediate
purpose may not have any direct bearing upon the
regional or national background, the background is sensed
as a distinctive element in the work.12
Each selected writer’s regional landscape offers a window
into the plurality of Irish culture, whether or not this
was reflected politically during the period in question.
The underlying aim of the project is to provide a re-examination
of disciplinary conventions and orthodoxies,
provoke research questions and foster public and academic
discourse.
Notes
1Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Kavanagh: Man and Poet,
(ed.) Peter Kavanagh, (Maine: National Poetry Foundation,
University of Maine at Orono, 1986) p. 15
2Douglas C. Pocock, Humanistic Geography and Literature:
Essays on the Experience of Place, (New Jersey:
Barnes & Noble Books, 1981) p. 15.
3D. W. Meinig, ‘Geography as an art’, Trans. Inst. Br.
Geogr. N.S. (1983) 316.
4Marwyn S. Samuels, ‘The Biography of Landscape:
cause and Culpability’, D.W. Meinig, (Ed.) The Interpretation
of Ordinary Landscapes (NY/Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979) p. 70.
5Y.F. Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception,
Attitudes, and Values, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall, 1974) p. 97.
6Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Kavanagh, 15.
7Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, (London: Vintage,
1997) p. 107.
8Charles Bowen, ‘A Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas,’
in Studia Celtica 10/11, (1975/76) p. 115.
9R. Woods and N. Shelton, An Atlas of Victorian Mortality
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997)
10T. M. Harris, ‘Moving GIS: exploring movement in
prehistoric cultural landscapes using GIS’ in G.R. Lock
(ed.) Beyond the Map: Archaeology and Spatial Technologies.
(Oxford: IOS Press, 2000) pp. 116-23. 11An increased spatial emphasis is a recent development
in the field of Irish Studies and conversely, historians
and other researchers in the humanities have begun to incorporate
the visual and analytical technology provided
by GIS in their studies. In regards to Irish Studies, Patrick
Duffy’s Exploring the History and Heritage of Irish
Landscapes (Four Courts Press: 2007) surveys in part
how literary and artistic representations of the environment
can provide insights into ‘imagined worlds of the
past.’ Tim Robinson’s Connemara: Listening to the Wind
(Penguin Ireland: 2006) explores environmental, cultural
and historical dimensions of this Atlantic county by
conducting a series of hermeneutic readings of natural
and human history within the context of contemplative
fieldwork. Andrew Kincaid’s Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial
Legacies and the Built Environment (University
of Minnesota Press: 2006) investigates the relationship
between ideology and material culture in the development
of twentieth century Irish social and political identity,
and Liam Kennedy, Paul S. Ell, E.M. Crawford
and L.A. Clarkson’s Mapping The Great Irish Famine:
A Survey of the Famine Decades (Dublin Four Courts
Press: 1999) incorporates Historical GIS to analyze and
visualize various social landscapes of Ireland during
the Famine years of the nineteenth century. The latter
title is emblematic of the emerging field of Historical
GIS which incorporates the study of history and culture
within a spatial perspective. Major research projects in
this growing field are illustrated by online portals such
as the The Salem Witch Trials Archive and The Valley
of the Shadow Project hosted by the University of Virginia’s
Center for Digital History, The China Historical
GIS hosted by the Center for Geographic Analysis
at Harvard University, The Historical Atlas of Canada
Online Learning Project hosted by the Department of
Geography at the University of Toronto, and the Great
Britain Historical GIS hosted by the Department of Geography
at Portsmouth University. These projects serve
as interactive online portals, which can be accessed by
interested scholars, educators and the general public.
12Seamus Heaney, the Place of Writing (Atlanta, Georgia:
Scholars Press, 1989) pgs. 20-21.