Few people have contributed as much, so disarmingly, as Anngret Simms - geographer, scholar, teacher, European and campaigner, writes Eileen Battersby
Always a geographer, Anngret Simms, reaches for a map and points, "there, east of Lubeck" to the Baltic town of Rostock where she was born. For her, maps reveal far more than words, they are adventures into the layers of history that create settlement. The former associate professor and head of geography at University College Dublin, Simms has not only inspired generations of students to see, instead of merely looking at, the landscape, she co-pioneered the development of historical geography in Ireland as an exciting multidisciplinary treasure trove offering endless possibilities.
She initiated, through the Royal Irish Academy, the Irish Historic Towns Atlas series which she now edits with Howard Clarke and Raymond Gillespie and consultant editor, John Andrews. She is the joint co-ordinator, with Ferdinand Opll in Vienna, of the European Historic Towns Atlas project, involving 17 European countries, including former communist states. To date, almost 400 European towns have been mapped.
The achievement of Simms - scholar, teacher, European, mother of three sons and Wood Quay campaigner - lies in her endless curiosity as well as her fascination with culture as a living, organic entity. Defining her achievement is well supported through looking at the diversity and quality of the volume of essays, Surveying Ireland's Past, which has been published in her honour. Edited by the medieval historian Howard Clarke, and two of her former PhD students, Jacinta Prunty, now a history lecturer in Maynooth and Mark Hennessy, who lectures in geography at Trinity College, there are 31 contributions from a formidable team of specialists.
Several of the pieces, including 'Reading the Ruins: the Presence of Absence in the Irish Landscape', a soaringly scholarly and imaginative tour de force by Kevin Whelan, another of her former students, should be broadcast. As should archaeologist Barry Raftery's questioning of the nature of Irish Celticity; medieval historian Katharine Simms's exploration of the Gaelic landscape in bardic poetry; historian Mary Daly's writings about the civic identity of post-Independence Dublin; archaeologist John Bradley's application of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas to urban history teaching; National Museum director Pat Wallace's reconstruction of Hiberno-Norse Dublin, medieval historian Howard Clarke's discussion of the fateful relations between medieval Dublin and England and historical geographer Stephen Royle's 'Small Towns in Ireland'.
Whelan's multidisciplinary article with its historical, geographic and literary elements, brilliantly reflects Simms's cultural and cultured approach. It is a remarkable tribute, as is the book, reflecting the best of archaeology, medieval history, social history, urban geography, historical geography and architectural history - but then it had to be, in order to be worthy of Simms, an original whose old-world German graciousness and formality are complemented by resourcefulness and a subversive sense of humour. She is very correct, meticulous, practical and crusadingly determined - "inherited from my businesswoman mother" - and very funny.
The eldest daughter of a publisher, himself the son of a publisher, the young Anngret Erichson discovered the landscape in the course of field trips undertaken on foot with her grandfather who introduced her to field monuments, Cistercian monasteries, once-elegant estate houses then crammed with refugees, as well as the old quays of Rostock once harbour to the great sailing boats of the Hanseatic League. Asked what made her a geographer, she refers to the influence of her visionary grandfather and also believes that the upheaval of a wartime childhood made her aware of different places.
"I SAW SO much of contrasting environments and heritages at an early age; I was a child of the northern lowlands who moved to the central uplands, and then on to the Rhinelands; so from the former west Slavic and German colonial settlement area, to the Rhinelands where the Roman influence is still alive in cities like Cologne." That move was part of the evacuation that brought her and her mother and two sisters (another sister and a brother, twins, were born after the war) to the Thüringin forest, the family home would later be destroyed, at first by bombing and later by the Soviet confiscation of all private land.
The old Hanseatic town of Rostock lost most of its medieval fabric, yet some of it was restored by the Communists. However, the street in which she was born, just off the 13th-century marketplace, was rebuilt in the massive Stalinist style, overriding previous private property boundaries. "Ironically these flats are now very popular because of their high quality building material and craftsmanship preceding the later Socialist prefabricated building style."
She was nine years old when the family left. After two days in a refugee camp in Berlin, they were transported by cattle train to Magdeburg, on the River Elbe. During the medieval period, it had been an important centre of trade for German and west Slavic people, but by the end of the war it had come to mark the border between the Soviet zone of influence and that of the Allies. It was a long journey, spent lying on the floor of a carriage.
"There were no windows, just this feeling of movement," she says. "I remember eating soup from huge cauldrons at the railway station. The end came when the door of the carriage was opened by a US soldier, who announced to us in German, "my friends, you are free".
Out of this displacement grew an awareness of place which was to shape her consciousness. The family settled in Cologne, a city she loves and where she later began her university career as an undergraduate studying English, geography and philosophy. But long before this, there had been the dramatic escape of her father. Having served as an officer for the entire war, ending up on the Eastern Front, he had returned to Rostock. Luckily, a Russian officer who was friendly with Simms's grandfather warned of Soviet plans to despatch all surviving German officers to Siberia.
"My father had been told to be at the market place at midnight, in order to be transported with other fellow officers to the western sector." Flight cost him his publishing house in Rostock; in Frankfurt, where Simms attended secondary school, he became a joint editor of Frankfurter Hefte, a Christian liberal journal.
While writing her PhD thesis on the Scottish Highlands, highlighting the transformation of the landscape from the 18th to the 20th century, she taught German in an Irish girls' school in Glasgow. "The students did not seem that interested in learning German. I remember shoes being thrown at me when tempers flared after football games."
During that time, she also met David Simms, a wry Irish academic then lecturing in maths at Glasgow University and who later become professor of maths at Trinity College (and has since merited, according to her, an honorary degree in geography). They married, and on settling in Dublin in 1965, she began what would become a 37-year involvement with University College Dublin.
At first, there was little security. As a married woman, she was then ineligible for staff tenure and worked as a part-time assistant in the geography department. In one of the first of her campaigns, she visited each head of department to sign a petition to be presented to the university president asking that married women be granted full tenure. It took a year, but the battle was won.
A much bigger battle emerged in 1974: the fight to save Wood Quay. Pat Wallace's excellent excavations faced threat of closure in order to facilitate the construction of the civic offices on the site of the finest Viking settlement in Europe. The medieval historian Rev F.X. Martin, chairman of the Friends of Medieval Dublin, of which Simms was then honorary secretary, took Dublin Corporation to the High Court where they won their case. Unfortunately, following the occupation of the site by the Rev Martin and his supporters, "the Supreme Court decided that he was a bad influence on the youth of Ireland" and the case was overturned.
"It was a battle that needed to be fought. We lost, but we did succeed in heightening heritage awareness in Ireland, and Dublin Corporation now has a city archaeologist and a city architect."
IT WAS SIMMS who approached Dublin Airport and suggested introducing a heritage programme which she then designed with her colleague, Howard Clarke. It has been a success and is well supported by the airport's development office.
Her vision of a university has always taken the classical view, that of the arts faculty as the cultural heart of learning. "The interdisciplinary nature of the MPhil, a post-graduate medieval degree course devised by the late Denis Bethell, contributed greatly to my understanding of the complex formation of European landscapes," she says.
Whether in editing or publishing, such as the towns atlas or the series on Dublin which she co-wrote and edited with Joe Brady, the current head of the geography department, whether working with the Urban Institute Ireland in UCD or promoting the European towns atlas from Helsinki to Budapest and Zagreb, she enjoys working with a team.
The hall of her Sandymount home is dominated by a beautiful 1582 copperplate reconstruction of Hanseatic Rostock, showing the Baltic Gothic architecture. She has three studies in the house, all coping with the overflow of books, maps, papers and projects.
"I've always tried to act as a link between Irish and European research, particularly in relation to the origins of towns. The book, which is part of the narrative of the Irish rural and landscapes is a particular joy for me because it shows my academic colleagues accepted me, an outsider who has joined their country."
Few outsiders have given so much, so disarmingly.
Surveying Ireland's Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms, edited by Howard B. Clarke, Jacinta Prunty and Mark Hennessy is published by Geography Publications, price 50