Reading the landscape

LANDSCAPE is seldom celebrated as widely in Irish cultural and literary life as one might expect. The shift from the rural to the urban has further consolidated an apparently casual attitude to our physical surroundings. John Montague's cautionary lines, "The whole landscape a manuscript/ We had lost the skill to read,/ A part of our past disinherited" (From `A Lost Tradition', The Rough Field 1972) have become prophetic.

Land as an issue has, in Ireland, always overshadowed the more complex notion of landscape. By its nature, landscape appears to be suspended in the imagination somewhere between the prevailing classical theories of tamed, linear and inhabited landscape as seen in 18th-century paintings and early 19th-century European painting, and the more romantic notions of landscape as a primitive, almost primeval entity. "Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery" argued the Victorian artist and critic Ruskin. "There are two landscapes, one outside the self and another within. Landscape is subject to how we perceive it, as well as our response, and how it in turn influences us. Which do we seek: the calm pastoral of classicism, or the more rugged, physically intimidating landscapes of post-Romanticism?

Land in its least abstract guise has been, and continues to be, a central force in Irish history and society. Concerns of an environmental as much as cultural or historical nature have led to the establishment of the Irish Landscape Forum, now in its third year, which meets next week at St Patrick's College, Maynooth. The day-two programme offers a number of wide-ranging papers and discussions intended to present a general overview of the impact of land use and design on our landscape - from aesthetics and heritage to tourism and road systems.

Devised by horticulturist Terry O'Regan, the forum will define and examine landscape in various ways, while also alerting us to exactly how much the native landscape, in all its diversity, actually means in a late 20th-century context, and how much it needs to be protected and, in relation to forestry and the urgent replenishment of broadleaf trees, rehabilitated. Ireland now has the lowest percentage of woodland of the EU states. The destruction of the boglands and hedgerows remain a contentious issue.

"Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock," argues Simon Schama, perhaps not entirely convincingly in Landscape And Memory (1995).

American zoologist Barry Lopez adopts a less celebratory tone in his 1988 National Book Award-winning study Arctic Dreams, in which he concedes that even the fierce beauty of that vast and remote wasteland has been subjected to man's behaviour: "Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete.

They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, `the people who change nature'

Despite expanding industrialisation, the Arctic landscape remains natural. Lopez, in common with the novelist, travel and natural history writer Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard (1978), shares a philosophically-inclined approach to reportage and also perceives a landscape through its animals. "We have long regarded animals as a kind of machinery," writes Lopez in Arctic Dreams, "and the kind of landscapes they move through as backdrops, as paintings. In recent years this antiquated view has begun to change. Animals are understood as mysterious, within the context of sophisticated Western learning that takes into account such things as biochemistry and genetics."

It could be argued, however, that in Ireland, wildlife certainly has far less visible impact than the more widely observed farming animals grazing in roadside fields. Here, animals are seen mainly as livestock.

Any country's landscape represents the synthesis of natural and cultural elements. No landscape remains static due to the forces of climate, weathering and time, and few remain natural because of man's impact and the various uses to which he puts his environment. A natural landscape is the product of geological, climatic and biological processes, while the cultural landscape is the story contained by layers of history and generations of human activity.

Writers as diverse as the French historian Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), and the Connemara-based English writer Tim Robinson, advocate a complex anthropological overview merging geology, archaeology, natural history, folklore, native cultures, linguistics and social history which succeeds in placing landscape at the centre of cultural explorations. While the vast grassland plains of Counties Meath and Kildare have been created by man, Robinson, by chronicling the limestone landscape of the Burren and Aran - an examination begun with Stones Of Aran, Pilgrimage and its sequel Labyrinth (1995) - is writing about a landscape which is certainly surreal, geologically unique and almost successfully self-protecting of its identity.

Land in Ireland refers to far more than the scenery. It represents self. Historically it is seen as a right; as an expression of ownership; as a contentious economic issue capable of dividing families and communities.

Aside from Yeats's mythic celebrations (and the poet, conscious of being an outsider, certainly drew on the land as a way to enter a culture which he felt distanced from), Ireland's poets and novelists habitually view the land as merely "countryside" - as a setting, often a farm, passively entrapping individuals desperate to escape, as Kavanagh does in Tarry Flynn (1948).

The land, therefore, is at times depicted as synonymous with thwarted ambitions and the need for flight. The lyric drama of Synge's and Liam O'Flaherty's work evoked island landscapes almost as metaphors for psychological tensions played out in claustrophobic communities. A play such as Riders To The Sea (1904) presents the sea as an unappeasable god hovering on the edge of a doomed world. John McGahern's approach to land and/or landscape is primarily for use as physical setting. McGahern introduces landscape as a functional device serving his characters and when asked, admits to dismissing lengthy descriptions of nature as "over writing".

As Irish writing becomes more predominantly urban, Seamus Heaney's memorialising of nature and its ordinary moments becomes more individual.

Irish writing has become increasingly urban, and determinedly unromantic. Which makes the importance writer Eugene McCabe places on the landscape in his outstanding Hardyesque novel, Death And Nightingales (1992) all the more valuable.

This traditional 19th century-style narrative takes place on a Fermanagh farm in a lakeland setting. McCabe evokes an atmosphere of Shakespearean moral unrest through the central metaphor of nature in turmoil.

In American fiction, landscape is not only a vital presence, it is often a central character. From Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (1885) to Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic odyssey across the American South West Blood Meridian (1985). The writers of the American South have always drawn on their lush native habitat, but so too have Westerners like Steinbeck and Easterners such as Russell Banks, Robert Olmstead and E. Annie Proulx, whose outstanding first novel Postcards (1992), though telling the story of a man haunted by an accidental crime, is also concerned with chronicling the death throes of Vermont small farming.

There has always been a strong tradition of natural history-based travel writing in the US, the country which has already given us over 100 years of National Geographic. John McPhee's Rising From The Plains (1986) is the story of the Wyoming landscape told almost exclusively through the facts of its astonishing geological history.

Ireland has its own pioneers in this genre of landscape writing. William Wilde's The Beauties Of The Boyne And Blackwater (1849) and Lough Corrib And Lough Mask (1867), and Synge's outstanding reportage, The Aran Islands (1907), were followed by remarkable scientists who could match their specialisation with skilful and engagingly observed personal narratives, as demonstrated by Robert Lloyd Praeger's The Way That I Went (1939) and by Frank Mitchell's The Way That I Followed (1991). Mitchell's classic study, Reading The Irish Landscape (1986, 1990, and a completely revised edition this year), represents the multi-disciplinary art of landscape writing at its most accomplished. This work may well have inspired the Atlas Of The Irish Rural Landscape - edited by F.H.A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan and Matthew Stout which is published later this month by Cork University Press. The Irish landscape is certainly asserting itself.