The peatlands of my youth feel eerie without machinery
Bord na Móna and the ESB defined the landscape of the midlands for decades. Now, as industrial turf-harvesting fades into the past, the author explains how its early days inspired his new novel
A couple of years ago, a photograph hanging in my parents’ house caught my eye. It had been up in a nook next to my brother’s bedroom door for years, but I’d never really looked at it properly.
It’s one of those framed aerial photographs of a house. These images were popular in rural Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. Ours has ‘1994’ printed on the bottom left-hand corner. If you were to look closely, you would see a girl, one of my younger sisters, stilled, as she cycles around the rear of the house.
To the top-right corner, my mother is doing some gardening among the leylandii bushes. It must be about noon in a late summer’s day because the sun is high and the trees flanking the property are covered in leaves and the lawn is somewhat scorched.
To the right of the curve in the driveway slumps a large mound of hand-cut turf, dropped there by my uncle some days earlier. Behind it gaze out two large windows, fitted to the front of my father’s engineering office. The image is bisected by two thin lines — electricity cables — held aloft by timber poles to the front and rear of the property.
Over the past 14 years, since I left my first profession as a structural engineer, I’ve undertaken a series of projects in the visual arts, film and literature. They stem from rural Irish infrastructures and buildings. I realised while looking at this photograph that the fundamental elements in it — a bungalow, an engineering office, electricity lines and turf — have appeared most often in my work. It is as if I have unselfconsciously devoted myself to asking: what are these things that surrounded me in my youth? And it occurred to me, looking at this photograph, that in terms of my fascinations, I have yet to leave my parents’ house.
Since 2009, I have been studying the Bungalow Bliss catalogue and the houses that came from it. From about 2011, when I began learning about the Rural Electrification Scheme, I embarked on a project that has took me from Ireland to central Finland and up into the Arctic. This project developed from an afternoon I spent in the ESB archive in Harold’s Cross, where I learned that most of the poles used by the electrification scheme during its early years came from Finnish forests. They were transported in their tens of thousands on ships from Helsinki to Dublin, Cork and Limerick.
At the same time, I developed an interest in ESB substations — these strange modular Bauhaus-like chunks of infrastructure that dot the Irish countryside. I began a photography project where I tried to find as many of the original Siemens-Schuckert substations in the midlands as I could. There was one in the centre of a field about a mile from my parents’ house, which I photographed often.
I also began to investigate the Bord na Móna housing developments that fringe the industrial boglands in the middle of Ireland. They were built in the 1950s to house people who came to work in the bogs, and most are still in use.
An architect who researched these villages suggested I read up on the public servant CS (Todd) Andrews and his 1982 memoir Man of No Property. I’d of course heard of Andrews, but had not been aware of the extent to which he was involved in so many Irish semi-state bodies, from Bord na Móna to CIÉ to the ESB to RTÉ.
The chapter in his book devoted to the bogs is by far the most extensive. I was struck by how talented a writer he was; his descriptions of people are like what one would find in a great 19th-century novel, and the clarity he brings to the processes he was overseeing has the sure-footedness of someone who understood every level of the company he ran.
He had incredible energy too, most of which was directed towards making the Irish peatlands into a viable fuel source for the new state. To do this, Andrews and a small team of researchers made two trips: one in 1935 to a variety of enormous bogs in Germany and Russia, and another in 1956 to these same but vastly changed countries. I loved reading about his first mission to Russia. It seemed to me like a kind of thriller, the crux being: “Will these intrepid Irish researchers learn enough about bog technology from these Russians to return to Ireland and successfully develop their own bogs?” I found myself, in the cracks in the narrative, imagining the conversations between the Irish and Russian technicians as they travelled around the gigantic bogs, power plants, drainage works and the sprawling networks of narrow-gauge railways. I imagined these Russian bogs as similar in general aspect to those in Ireland: broad, lonely and windswept places, fringed with shivering flowers.
The digging of a trench in a peat bog in the west of Ireland in 1951. Photo by Charles Hewitt via Getty Images
It was from these imaginings that I developed one of the central relationships in my new novel The Geometer Lobachevsky. It’s between a fictional Irish technician and a fictional Soviet surveyor, Nikolai Lobachevsky, who in my novel is making an official visit to Ireland in late spring of 1950 to help this old colleague with a difficult land survey. I placed these figures on Bord na Móna land close to Birr, Co Offaly. The bogland in the first half of my novel is swamp-like. It has not yet been drained, never mind dried out or harvested. My fictional characters struggle to measure this unstable land.
I took a number of research trips of my own into parts of this same bog. I found the industrial peatlands were nearing the end of production. I took photographs documenting that strange moment when the land is no longer being extracted, but where the infrastructure of extraction still lies impotently there, bent and broken and quiet. Most of the Bord na Móna lands in Longford, Laois and Roscommon have had their drainage systems removed or blocked up. The water tables have risen, and the excavated ground is now all shallow lake and rushes and tentative wildlife.
The land looks more similar, I imagine, to what CS Andrews would have encountered back in the early 1930s, before extraction began; the difference being that now reserves of combustible peat no longer exist under the water, nor reserves of geological time and frozen incidental moments in human history.
I don’t know the natural landscape of my youth without these conspicuous machines — substations, power-station chimneys, narrow-gauge railways, peat harvesters — sitting on or moving across the space. So when I returned home to visit my parents a few months back, and they took me out for a walk around a recently reclaimed stretch of industrial bog — now a lake — I found that the absence of machinery and infrastructure made the place eerie and unnatural.
When I looked at this framed aerial photograph of our house once more, I realised that this arrangement of fundamental elements I’ve spent my time looking at hold not only processes and energy, but also stories that reach out far beyond their setting.
