Issue No.1 Summer 2000

Lesser Known Beauty Spot

By Olwyn Douglas (Cultural Abuse Victim in Recovery)

I'd like to take you on a journey. You've probably taken it yourself, but like most familiar paths it is taken for granted. Few stop to reflect - to look at their beauty; to listen to the stories, or hear the histories - until it is too late. And they are gone or lost in memory.

This place I want to take you is both real, (it exists as a physical reality), and mythical - thus charged with immense psychic energy. It has immense cultural significance. It acts as a fault-line into our cultural psyche. Like any rupture, or crack perceived in a stable surface, it is a place of inherent danger but if traversed with respect, and perhaps love. This dark crevice of unacknowledged depth can be transformed into a source of healing.

No one can dispute the beauty of this place. The North has an ancient poetic, yet forlorn beauty. It has held not only our ancestors to ransom but holds us all in its powers. None of us, who are of this place, can separate ourselves from the struggle for its ideological ownership - or from ensuring conflict of the last thirty years. Some, like myself, have not actively engaged in the struggle for cultural supremacy. From a safer position, have not needed to defend or protect, to attack or reclaim. Nor have been required to take up arms or volunteer one's life.

Yet us innocents are as responsible as those who have seen active service, (on either side), for the intensity of passion which has fuelled the most barbaric acts of identity endorsement - that which our ancestors would have regarded as 'blood sacrifice'. It is all part of the collective yearning/obsession for 'ownership'. Part of the fabric of our psyches, the cradle of our identity - the place from where we gain awareness and self-knowledge of who we are.

This place exists in real time and in the mythic, duree, intuitive time. It is a place of real beauty, yet is shrouded in the pain of psychic rupture, of a people who, for all but a few, have lost a sense of who they are - the Protestant people of Ireland, Planters and Dissenters.

The train from Coleraine to Derry, for most unknowingly, transverses a spine of land, that has mapped our nationality and cultural identity for nearly two centuries - transfixing us rigidly in a historical ideology which may no longer serve its people. Yet the sheer beauty and majesty of the terrain, gives few indicators that one is crossing through one of the most historically significant imperialist battlegrounds in Ireland. The journey into the site is pure theatre. Nature has conspired with man's lust for domination, to create a landscape so rich in drama and of such bewitching beauty that one is lulled into a surreal surrender of sensory fantasy.

As the train leaves Coleraine the scene is prepared - the traveller is proffered the gently undulating sea views of the Bann fenland as the train approaches the barmouth, outside Castlerock. Vistas of horizons of Atlantic breakers, viewed through reed-skirted dunes become the constant; as one is lulled into a hypnosis of sublime appreciation. A serenity, interrupted abruptly by the dark entry into the passage of the Downhill tunnel - where all sensory stimuli is removed and the quest for light and survival replaces the sensuality of natures' teasing. The drama has begun.

Yet nothing prepares for the squinting extrusion into a place radiating with ephemeral light and baroque like beauty. Struggling to process the sensory transformations necessary, the viewer is thrust almost tide side into the seven-mile stretch of Benone Strand. Honey gold sand piping a frothing turquoise sea that floats into an unbroken horizon of unknown beyond. Perhaps where we came from - or where others through their lack of understanding - would have us return.

And all this viewed in the theatrical time - the film fed through sprockets of frames, (the carriage window), racketing to the sound of the in-feeding track. Frozen frames of purple, (Donegal hills), dissolving into an oceanic panoramic sweep of Cretan blue; flanked by golden flails of sand. All viewed from the armchair theatre of the train.

Fantasy incomplete, the eye becomes diverted backward, to a dark, stumbling block of basalt protruding seaward, skyward - the cliff embankment of the fairy-tale folly of Mussendun Temple - the symbolic gatehouse of magical domain. The track snakes furtively along the foothills of towering of Binevenagh escarpment - the western rim of the Antrim Plateau - along a silver of land at one time stolen from a distracted sea. Carefully, as if not to wake a slumbering hulk of boulder strewn mountain which periodically sheds vast mud-slumps onto the puny tracks.

Respectful of nature's permission of safe-passage the traveller is taken into a more sombre territory - the approaching Umbra, the dark place, where road and rail dissect each other. A shadow land of geography and soul - a place of old energies and untold darkness. Where 'sensitive's' shudder in vague recognition of remnants of ancient time trapped ritual, perhaps sacrificial. And where cynics acknowledge they are fast approaching another vortex of modern human suffering - Magilligan Prison, marooned, despite its ugliness, in the spectacular arrowhead foreland of Magilligan Point.

It is on this triangular swathe of lowland, close to the prison perimeters and within protective distance of the impressive Martello Tower, (built in 1812 to guard the entrance to Lough Foyle against possible invasion during the Napoleonic wars), that a base-camp was established on September 1827, from which the British Government commenced the formal colonial mapping of Ireland.

This baseline formed not only the scientific mapping of Ireland's geography, but also the rigid cultural classification of the island's people. County Londonderry, which was one of the counties most heavily planted with settlers was turned into an exotic colonial case study, with every detail and intimate aspect of native and planter's social and economic life being recorded in 'zoological fashion'. By inscribing in Doomsday Book fashion the genealogical, religious, linguistic and national affiliations of its inhabitants, the cultural mapping exercise etched into history, and into the future, the colonial preference to keep the two races apart.

If Ulster's Protestant population have difficulty in perceiving themselves to be Irish, as well as British subjects, then I would suggest the roots of this cultural dis-inheritance lie buried in this fault line of cultural abuse. As is often the history of colonial rule - the rulers succeed to hold power by divide and rule. Not because one child is preferred over the other, but by divisively favouring one - can guarantee its loyalty in controlling the other.

Ulster's Protestant population are vilified by many, some of whom regard them still as historical oppressors, but such black and white definitions fail to understand the pathos of their make-up, the history of their exploitation by those they trusted. Nor does the continual cries of oppression from contemporary Northern Republicanism allow the wounded sore of 'defensive siege' mentality to heal.

There is a place of lesser-known beauty - in the soul of a people that is trying to re-define, to re-articulate their identity and ideology - the value of their dissenting origins.

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