Heritage,identity and community engagement at Dunluce Castle,Northern Ireland

As Northern Ireland transitions out of conflict, increased attention is being paid to the role heritage can play in building peace across society and developing a more sustainable future. Recent archaeological investigations at Dunluce Castle have uncovered elements of the site’s Gaelic past and the remains of an early seventeenth-century town built immediately prior to the Crown-sponsored Plantation of Ulster. The project included a dynamic programme of community engagement and outreach that created opportunities to work as a group in the embodied act of recovering the physical past. This formed a space in which to challenge aspects of the region’s contested past and facilitated the renegotiation of accepted local histories and existing identity constructs.     

E.A. Markham’s St. Caesare: the other “Ulster”?

This essay examines the invented Caribbean island of St. Caesare and its relation to the representational space of “Ulster” in Montserratian poet E.A. Markham’s collection Letter from Ulster and the Hugo Poems (1993). As the title of the book implies, it unites two of the poet’s home islands, Ireland and Montserrat. Ireland was Markham’s home at the moment when he drafted many of these poems, as he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine from 1988 to 1991. However, as a Caribbean writer of Afro-Irish heritage, Ireland is also home in that it represents a “hinterland”. Of the Caribbean islands, Montserrat is the most closely identified with Ireland owing to its Irish cultural inheritance, which has earned it the nickname “The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean”. This article surveys Markham’s depictions of St. Caesare and “Ulster” as analytical spaces that enable him to chart the palimpsestic topologies of Montserrat and Northern Ireland. The author argues that Markham limns St. Caesare and “Ulster” as transatlantic mirror images to allow for critical relationality between Montserrat and Northern Ireland.     

Politicised linguistic consciousness: the case of Ulster‐Scots

This essay examines the evolution of the Ullans phenomenon in the past decade and sets its emergence in a broad political context. Of particular interest to the writer are the claims made about Ullans and the attempts to constitute these as a viable basis for its justification as a distinct language. While factors motivating the supporters of an Ulster‐Scots cultural tradition are examined, reasons for hostility towards Ullans are also reviewed. As the debate regarding the linguistic status of Ullans rages on, the author analyses the importance of state recognition for the enhancement of a dialect or language. In this essay the case of Ulster‐Scots is set in a strongly comparative context.     

Scottish national identities among inter-war migrants in North America and Australasia

Interpretations of Scottish identities have for too long been immersed in an inward-looking or domestic perspective. Where constructions of migrant identities exist they too have been influenced by developments about identity within Scotland, specifically a focus on Highlandism, by a disproportionate concentration on the Scots in Canada, and by exclusion of the twentieth-century migrant experience. This article examines the personal testimonies of Scots in several destinations and argues that they manifested a striking range of external and internal manifestations of their national identities. Unlike Irish migrants, however, whose cultural institutions served a dual purpose, allowing their identities to be proclaimed and engaging in active pursuit of political objectives, the major construction of Scottishness was internalised. Furthermore, visible expressions of Scottish identities did not generate disapproval from the public at large that the assertion of Irish identities occasionally excited. Despite its relative invisibility this sense of being Scottish was powerful and dynamic and shows a Scottish world coexisting within a British one.     

The marriage plot and the plot against the Union: Irish Home Rule and endangered alliances in Henry James's “The Modern Warning”

By the period of the Irish Home Rule crisis – in which Catholics and liberal Anglicans lobbied for limited self-government while northern Presbyterians campaigned to keep Ulster wholly within the Union between Ireland and Great Britain of 1800 – certain of those of pre-Famine northern Irish Protestant origins (the “Scots-” or “Scotch-Irish”) identified with the position of their Presbyterian brethren in Ulster. This identifiably Ulster Protestant engagement with the Home Rule debate is detectable (and generally overlooked) in the Scots-Irish Henry James story “The Modern Warning”. Moreover, equally discounted is the fact that James's story deploys the Irish literary convention of the marriage plot as metaphor for political union in order to grapple with a moment in which that alliance is – in the unionists' view – in danger. This article concludes that the political-union-as-marriage trope still sporadically returns at moments of political crisis in the British Isles, as occurred during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate.     

Marine geophysical investigation of the inshore coastal waters of Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has been subject to significant maritime influences throughout its 9000-year known human history. In 1997 the University of Ulster in partnership with the Environment and Heritage Service (DOE, NI) embarked on a programme of seabed mapping in an attempt to record the submerged and buried archaeological resource using a suite of geophysical equipment including a side-scan sonar, a Chirp sub-bottom profiler and a proton precession magnetometer. The geophysical research programme has successfully imaged 80 19th- and 20th-century wrecks, and 20 targets of further archaeological potential. These data will aid the production of wreck-prediction indices for the coastline of Northern Ireland based on site formation processes and site stability. This information will make valuable additions to both Sites and Monuments Records and to the shipwreck database currently under consideration at the University of Ulster.     

‘Ulster's love in letter'd gold’: the Battle of the Somme and the Ulster Memorial Tower, 1918–1935

This paper employs ideas of distance and proximity in exploring the diverse meanings of the Ulster Memorial Tower at Thiepval, France, between 1918, when the idea of an Ulster memorial was first proposed, and 1935, when responsibility for its maintenance was passed to the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Tower, erected in 1921 as a memorial to men from Ulster who died in the Great War, can be read in a number of different but not necessarily easily reconciled ways. The construction and subsequent life of the memorial is inseparable from the politics of Irish partition and the consolidation of a unionist state in Northern Ireland. It is argued that that the meanings of the Tower were constructed both internally within Northern Ireland as an identity marker but also externally directed as the prime symbol of Britain's debt to Protestant Ulster. The paper concludes that the Tower's geographical distance from the society which had erected it was crucial, both to the external statements it made and to its ultimate lack of internal relevance to Ulster.     

For the Community: Scottish Historical Archaeology and the Politics of Land Reform

In Scotland, land reform is, historically and still today, a defining political issue and a subject of debate. Central to this debate are different ideological understandings of the rural past. In this paper, I discuss the nature of the Scottish land question and explore several of the main—sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting—ideologies concerning land, as put forward or supported by different constituencies: politicians; landowners; crofters; Scots more generally; and members of the Scottish diaspora. I consider the histories to which these ideologies relate and seek to locate the historical archaeology of rural Scotland in its political and social contexts.     

Not quite as British as Finchley: the failed attempt to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland

In a previous issue of Irish Studies Review I examined the unanticipated emergence in the late 1980s of a series of Conservative associations in Northern Ireland. In this follow-up article, I will seek to account for the subsequent swift and ignominious decline in the early 1990s of the Northern Irish Conservatives. While the fortunes of the Ulster Tories were undermined by a number of contingencies – the vagaries of parliamentary arithmetic and their own lack of political judgement foremost among them – their fate was sealed primarily by certain rather more structural concerns. In particular, the rapid decline of the Conservative associations in Northern Ireland owes its origins to the historically “loveless marriage” between Ulster unionists and the British state. The unionist community simply refused to vote in meaningful numbers for a political party at the centre of a Westminster establishment deemed hostile to the cause of the Union. In addition, the Conservative hierarchy would inevitably prove unwilling to nurture their own party associations in Northern Ireland as this “integrationist” project ran precisely counter to their own longstanding political ambitions for the region. This conflict of interests and intentions would in short order ensure the demise in all but name of the Northern Irish Conservatives. There can be few more dramatic illustrations of the mutual distrust that conjoins Ulster unionists and the British state than the string of lost deposits incurred by Conservative candidates running for office in Northern Ireland.     

The Chronology of the Last Scandinavian Kings of York,AD 937–954

Abstract

The Cistercian Abbey of Holm Cultram was a twelfth-century royal foundation of Prince Henry, son of King David I when this part of northern England was under Scottish control. The abbey developed a successful network of benefactors spanning both sides of the Border. It was also effective in developing positive relationships with key ecclesiastical figures including Bishop Christian of Whithorn and bishops of Glasgow. The economic strength of the abbey was derived from wool, salt and fish production. In 1193, a daughter house named Grey Abbey was founded in Ulster. The benefits of the frontier location were cut short with the onset of the wars in the 1290s. Holm Cultram Abbey found itself on the path of the marching armies and had to provide supplies and lodgings. When the estates of the abbey and the precinct were attacked by the Scots on several occasions in the fourteenth century, the community turned to the English kings for compensation. On other occasions the abbots did not hesitate to pay ransom to prevent damages to the abbey. Not only the economic difficulties brought by the war, but also loss of contact with the mother house of Melrose and Scottish benefactors more generally, altered the character of Holm Cultram, which became a much more English institution when the cross-Border networks were cut off.     

Ways of seeing the Scottish Highlands: marginality, authenticity and the curious case of the Hebridean blackhouse

This paper examines popular cultural constructions of the Scottish Highlands during the interwar period. Situating events within the literary and artistic context of the «Celtic Twilight», it traces the establishment, and subsequent links between, two pioneering «heritage» sites which used as their focus the «blackhouse», the vernacular form of habitation in the Highlands. These sites, created under the auspices of the National Trust for Scotland and the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition, are understood as «official» expressions of a romanticized, imaginary geography heavily reliant on ideas of cultural authenticity and marginality. By considering aspects of the «Self/Other» representational dialectic and placing in question popular constructions of peripherality the paper considers how such projects, ostensibly motivated by remembrance and preservation, were also a highly selective means of national identification. Ultimately, the work demonstrates how the modern impulse to differentiate between, and thereby classify, distinctive cultural traditions and forms of knowledge facilitated an obvious Highland bias in what subsequently became Scotland's accepted historiography.     

Symbols, Myth-Making, and Identity: The Red Hand of Ulster in Late Nineteenth-Century Paterson, New Jersey

Symbols are manipulated to express social identity and to reaffirm or create a sense of place. Smoking pipes recovered from late nineteenth-century privies in the Dublin Section of Paterson, New Jersey, bear the symbol of the Red Hand of Ulster. Today, the Red Hand of Ulster is ubiquitous on Unionist murals throughout Northern Ireland symbolizing Northern Irish Protestant identity. Originally, the Red Hand symbolized the dawn of the Irish High King of Ulster. In late-nineteenth-century Paterson, it is argued here, the symbol was embedded in ethnic politics involving the Irish Diaspora and Irish–American identity developed through the Gaelic revival and Irish–American organizations and labor unions.     

Platforms of Reconciliation? Issues in the Management of Battlefield Heritage in the Republic of Ireland

Abstract

Although the battlefields of the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691) are situated in the Republic of Ireland they are revered iconic landscapes embodying the religious and cultural identity of the Orange Order and Unionists in Northern Ireland. This paper looks at how these battlefields have been appropriated by some, or actively ignored by others, to reflect a cultural and religious identity and, how they have come to be ever more relevant in a modern political environment with the efforts of reconciliation between the north and south of Ireland.     

Language as a public good and national identity: Scotland's competing heritage languages

The preservation of one or several historically and culturally important languages may be a salient political issue in some polities. Although they may not be used as an active means of communication, these languages can also serve a symbolic identitary function. These ‘heritage’ languages can be seen as ‘public goods’ and that even non‐speakers of these languages can have opinions regarding their importance to national identity. In the Scotland example, while Gaelic has been the focus of proactive government legislation and education initiatives, Scots is still struggling for status as a recognised language. Both languages are in some way constituent parts of Scottish identity that at times may seem in competition with one another. Using original survey data, we delve deeper into questions of language, identity and politics in Scotland. First, we describe how public opinion is divided over the importance of Gaelic and Scots to Scottish identity. Second, we use attitudes towards these languages as a dependent variable looking at Scottish identity and attachment. Finally, we use these attitudes towards Gaelic and Scots as an independent variable in models for party identification in Scotland.     

The role of heritage attractions in sustainable tourism strategies: The experience in Ireland

Ireland, located on the north‐west periphery of Europe, illustrates all the difficulties of a small, marginal, island economy. It is an ancient landscape rich in heritage and cultural features. Tourism is now a vital part of the Irish economy and recent research has demonstrated that ‘Irishness’. whilst difficult to define, is the major appeal to overseas visitors. In 1989 the Irish Government challenged Bord Failte (the Irish Tourist Board) to double revenue from overseas tourists and create 25,000 new jobs. Heritage attractions formed a fundamental feature of Bord Failte's Framework Plan for Tourism. The methodology adopted for the development and interpretation of heritage attractions is evaluated in this paper, together with an assessment of the outcomes of the strategy. This particular initiative is discussed in the context of sustainable tourism strategies.     

The little ice age in the Scottish Highlands and Islands: Documenting its human impact

This paper examines the Little Ice Age in the Scottish Highlands and Islands and uses documentary evidence to show its impact on the farm economy. It has three sections. The first examines how Highland climate may have changed during the Little Ice Age, and notes that increased storminess was probably as much a factor as lower annual mean temperatures. The second takes the most severe phase of the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum, 1645–1715, and uses rests or eases of rent to show how it stressed the farm economy. The third examines evidence for the abandonment of land during the Maunder Minimum. As well as arguing that we need to see abandonment in its social as well as physical setting, it highlights the role played by the temporary abandonment of land and suggests that such abandonment along the western seaboard probably indicates the impact of increased storminess.     

The British Empire and revolutionary national poetry

ABSTRACT. The British empire set off an explosion of poetry, in English and native languages, particularly in India, Africa and the Middle East. This poetry – largely neglected in the scholarship on nationalism – was often revolutionary both aesthetically and politically, expressing a spirit of cultural independence. Attacks on England and the empire are common not just in native colonial poetry but also in poetry of the British isles. This article discusses some of the most influential poets, including: Shawqi of Egypt, Tagore of India, Rusafi of Iraq, Yeats of Ireland, Iqbal of Pakistan, Greenberg of pre‐State Israel, and Kipling, the ‘poet of empire’. In contrast with other empires, many poets were inspired by British culture to create revolutionary art and seek political independence. Most strikingly, British rule was instrumental in the revival of vernacular Hebrew poetry after 1917 as the centre of Hebrew literature shifted from Odessa to Tel Aviv.     

The Scottish Covenanters and the Borough of Sunderland, 1639–1647: A Hidden Axis of the British Civil Wars*

Few sources have survived relating to the borough of Sunderland in the seventeenth century. However, during the Civil Wars Sunderland was noticed for its support of Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters. A Puritan elite, led by George Lilburne, had established Sunderland as a radical borough by the 1630s. Good relations between Sunderland and the Covenanting Scots began in 1639 and continued throughout the Bishops’ Wars (1639–41) and the first British Civil Wars (1642–46). This was unusual in the North East of England as most of County Durham, Northumberland and Newcastle upon Tyne would remain loyal to King Charles I. A trade blockade of Newcastle, Sunderland and Blyth during 1643–44 was quickly lifted at Sunderland after the Scots garrisoned the town in March 1644. This gave Sunderland a temporary, but advantageous, lead over their rivals in Newcastle. Sunderland’s port was crucial for supplying the Scottish Covenanting army and Parliamentarian forces during 1644–46, and the coal mines along the River Wear proved a vital source of revenue for paying the army. The borough’s leaders were well rewarded for their loyalty and, unlike other leading supporters of Parliament in the North, they did not object to paying for the Scottish occupation of the North East.     

Adjustment and Integration: The Scottish Representation in the British House of Commons, 1707–14*

The small minority of Scots who entered the house of commons in 1707 were slow to make their mark. Besides lack of numbers, they suffered several significant disadvantages. The Westminster scene was strange, and the style and tone of debate more vigorous and informal. Moreover, the aristocracy had dominated the unicameral Scottish parliament, and commoners found it difficult to emancipate themselves from noble tutelage. Most importantly, Scottish politics did not yet reflect the two‐party system dominant in England. Thus in the first sessions the Scots were unable to make headway in the essential business of parliament, legislation. Scotland suffered in comparison with the English provinces, and even the Irish, who were able to muster a more effective lobby. Soon, however, a new generation of debaters appeared, able to use their wit to discomfit English antagonists, and a new class of ‘men of business’ who grasped the rules of the legislative game. The fortuitous deaths of leading magnates and the polarisation of sectarian antagonisms in Scotland permitted the coalescence of the Scottish representation into two broad factions allied with the English parties. It was with English tory support that bills were passed to benefit the sectional concerns of Scottish episcopalians, accompanied by other measures of a more general nature. The combined attempt by Scottish peers and MPs in 1713 to secure the repeal of the union does not point to a lasting breakdown in Anglo‐Scottish relations, since it was also a manifestation of political opportunism by English whigs and discontented tories, and their Scottish allies. But the dawn of a party system in Scotland was dispelled by the death of Queen Anne and the ensuing jacobite rebellion. The complicity of tories in the Fifteen resulted in the destruction of the party in Scotland, and the construction of a whig hegemony.