Hidden IrelandIreland - an unexpected pleasure, ran the tourist board tag-line a few years ago. Rosita Boland, inspired by her educational school map of Ireland, has gone in pursuit of a few of them, her vivid pen infusing life and colour into the pages of a children's atlas.
With her dying Volkswagen Polo, she has explored unvisited sites in every county and put them together in a cabinet of curiosities, a 19th-century pastime that Boland appears to find madly exciting. I too have a fetish for obscure museums - Ceim Hill Museum, near Glandore, Co Cork, whose display includes fossils, cloaks and cannonballs, vies with the Cobbes' eclectic 1790s collection at Newbridge House, Donabate, Co Dublin as my favourite, though both escape this collection.
To those who can read them, maps can be redolent of emotions, smelling of the Spice Islands and the sewers of Cairo. Certain cities are defined by their maps: Thomas's Los Angeles, Leconte's Paris par Arrondissement, The A-Z of London. But maps are as subjective as their makers. They reflect boldly a particular vision of the world. The elegant brown hatching on the 19th-century one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, with their detailed delineation of large estates, displays an entirely different society from the brash chemical colourings of the 21st-century Discovery series, where motorways and visitor centres are dominant. When planning a peregrination around Ireland for my intrepid clients, I start with Taylor & Skinner's road book of 1770, whose main post roads have often become grassy tracks. Sadly my clients don't even have maps nowadays, relying instead on in-car GPS. Boland's secret map reflects the changing of society, with emptying monasteries and graves disappearing below function rooms, the art of the cartographer giving way to digital satellite technology.
A delightful book to receive and an easy book to put down, one is left wondering whether it is a collection of essays, a travel guide, scripts for Sunday Miscellany, or if Boland is in training to become a leader writer. In one chapter she wanders across Kathmandu and Baltistan whilst discussing the eccentricities of the Donegal/Fermanagh border. In Limerick she becomes a straight guidebook writer, leading her readers to unlikely tombs and remarkable carvings. In Wicklow she reflects on the idiocies of the Government's millennium celebrations. Boland has never had a camera, and instead stores lists of images, a patchwork of memories. In some cases the lists begin to resemble Schott's Original Miscellany as she enumerates the bizarre offerings at a rag bush in Kilkenny or the topics for the folklore collection of 1938.
In the "not a lot of people know that" genre (a phrase coined by Peter Sellers rather than Michael Caine - not a lot of people know that), the book bursts with useful information to impart during embarrassing silences. Did you know that Lough Neagh contains 200 million eels and belongs to Lord Shaftesbury? Boland is surprised that no one could tell her exactly where Shaftesbury lived, having missed the news that the descendant of the champion of working children disappeared in bizarre circumstances from the Austin Powers-esque Noga Hilton in Cannes and his body was found some weeks later in the Alps. Shaftesbury's interest in Ulster stems from the marriage of his great-grandfather to the daughter of the impecunious Marquis of Donegal, and Belfast Castle was their Irish home until his father presented it to the city in 1934. Of the late Lord Shaftesbury, his friends joked that he was a "philanthropist who specialised in rescuing lap dancers".
Generally Boland's writing bursts with energy and excitement. Even though I well remember the discovery of the Derrynaflan chalice, the blow-by-blow retelling of the story is gripping and the vivid language describing the windswept bog brought out goosebumps on a sunny afternoon. Despite her academic forays into libraries, this is no deep work of research. She skims the surface, tempting the reader to pursue matters further.
Occasionally the surprises that she chooses are not inspired. In Co Down she explores a lost village of which there are no visible remains. Having once spent a sweaty and fly-infested afternoon in Sligo with the Military History Society, searching for a battlefield of which there were no visible remains, I have an abiding antipathy to seeking abstract sites. My aversion was enforced by Charles McLean, whose excellent guide to the east coast of Scotland, The Fringe of Gold, includes an entirely invented village, of which he writes that there are no visible remains. "All that is known about it was that the inhabitants were involved in the worship of the fresh-water dolphin".
Had Boland but researched a little further she would have found that at Tyrella she was only yards from a real secret surprise - the remains of the only Chinese Garden in Ireland, as well as a Moorish fort and the cannons from the Great Eastern.
In the 1960s there was Eric Newby's Wonders of Ireland. Monie Begley wrote Rambles in Ireland in the 1970s; Des Moore's Offbeat Ireland followed in the 1980s. Rob Vance's recent Secret Sights has even spawned a television series. The Secret Map of Ireland is a worthy addition to this collection of essential obscure knowledge.
John Colclough is a director of Adams and Butler, which organises holidays in the secret places of Ireland, Britain and South Africa and whose guide, The Country Inns and Historic Homes of Ireland, is an exploration of lesser-known places to stay
A Secret Map of Ireland By Rosita Boland New Island, 251pp. €14.99