As Estyn Evans's classic book on the Mourne Mountains is reissued, Eileen Battersby takes a look at the 'founding father of Irish geography'
'I cannot claim any special feats of conquest or endurance as a mountain climber, but I have lived under and walked among the Mournes at all seasons and in all weathers, and have scrambled up nearly all the 60 or 70 summits which can be considered separate hill-tops," writes Welsh geographer Emyr Estyn Evans on the opening page of his definitive book on the area. To read Mourne Country is to want to wander in its landscape. "The Mountains of Mourne in Co Down are perhaps better known outside Ireland, by name at least, than any other group of mountains in the island," he points out. "The melody and words of Percy French's popular song have fixed in the memory their two most outstanding qualities: the fact that they sweep down to the sea and the magnetic power they exert on those who have lived between the hills and the sea."
The formal, rather elegant and informative text of Mourne Country, first published in 1951, expresses and defines the magic of one of the most beautiful, evocative and mysterious landscapes on this island.
Reissued by Dundalgan Press to mark the centenary of the birth of Estyn Evans, the new edition has not only honoured Evans and his scholarly, engaging work, it has demonstrated the high quality of independent traditional publishing. Small presses - of which the Dundalgan, established in 1859, is an excellent example with its formidable back-list of antiquarian, architectural, botanical and local his of tory titles - have a tradition publishing valuable and beautiful specialist books. Four editions of Mourne Country were published in Evans's lifetime, including one in 1989, the year of his death. He twice revised the text and it is no surprise to discover that Evans dedicated it to fellow visionary and multidisciplinary scholar Robert Lloyd Praeger.
The origin of Mourne Country began 1945, when a Dundalk publisher approached one of his authors about a possible book. The publisher was Harry Tempest (1881-1964) of Dundalgan Press; the author was the singular, visionary Evans (1905-89), professor of geography at Queen's University Belfast, a Welshman whose contribution to Irish culture and cultural landscape studies had been evident as early as his acclaimed study Irish Heritage.
That was his first book, published in 1942, also by Dundalgan - Tempest had suggested Evans write it. These men enjoyed a shared understanding that created an enduring legacy.
Evans had nurtured the department of geography at Queen's University since arriving there as a 23-year-old graduate in 1928. Although he was employed to teach geography, the university did not have a geography department. But Evans, a born teacher, set about creating one and was to spend his life in Belfast.
Influenced by the French geographical tradition of regional-based landscape studies, pioneered by historian Fernand Braudel and Carl Sauer, Evans, who had been a student of HJ Fleure at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, was keen to undertake a project such as the one Tempest was suggesting. From Fleure, Evans had come to view "regional social evolution as a continuous interaction between people and their environment". Initially, he considered basing the proposed book on north Co Antrim, with particular reference to the glens.
But Tempest, amateur botanist and antiquarian, if primarily a traditional publisher possessed of natural curiosity and publishing genius, already knew what he wanted: a book about the Mournes, spanning Carlingford Lough, the Cooley Peninsula, the harbours of Annalong and Kilkeel and the forest parks of Castlewellan and Tollymore Park. He had long planned on publishing a book about the area; he knew it well, and had walked and climbed there. It had an interesting topography, history and a wealth of folklore, ideal for an imagination such as Evans's. Tempest had taken fine photographs, many of them in colour, and several were good enough to publish. In Evans he had a writer alert to a cohesive culture, a scholar who wrote with accessible ease and whose approach was based upon fieldwork.
IT TOOK TIME. Evans, as always, was busy teaching, travelling, broadcasting and writing. Through periods spent living in a cottage beside the Bloody Bridge River on the lower slopes of Slieve Donard, whose "lofty majesty" he so admired, Evans undertook what proved to be inspirational research. The result, Mourne Country, was a classic of multidisciplinary landscape study.
He arranged his book in 22 self-contained, subject-specific chapters that are often cross-referenced. The geology, the distinctive granite bedrock, the archaeology, the legacy of the Anglo-Normans, ship building, the harvesting of the seaweed, the hardships endured by the fishermen, the fact the Big Wind of 1839 was believed to have blown all the fairies away, the religions - all this is included. Ever intrigued by folklore and local customs, Evans tells the story of nearby Greencastle, its famous fair and its even more famous castle. It is a book graced by the intimate understanding of a native, even though it was written by an outsider.
As his widow Gwyneth would write of Evans after his death: "He walked the length and breadth of the mountains. He got to know the farmers, the fishermen and the granite workers. Perhaps it was the latter group he most amused with his constant questions. And he enjoyed 'passing the time' leaning over the half-door of the cottage. He felt assured that he had been accepted when, one spring day, he asked a friendly local shopkeeper for some new potatoes to be told that there were none. 'But there is a boat in the harbour full of Mourne potatoes,' he replied. 'Them,' said the Mourne man contemptuously, 'are Pilots - they are only fit for the English'."
Born in Shrewsbury in 1905, Estyn Evans, one of five children, was the son of a Welsh-speaking father who had been orphaned at nine years of age and at 12 began tending the fans in a mine. Working underground entitled him to three half-days' schooling a week. Eventually Evans snr became a Methodist minister. Their father's Non-conformist religious vocation set the Evans children apart.
Having taken a first class honours degree in geography, then a subject still awaiting serious recognition, Estyn Evans decided to pursue his post graduate studies in archaeology. However, he became stricken with TB.
Convalescence was spent in Wiltshire with a doctor who was also an amateur archaeologist. In his company, Evans joined in excavation work at Stonehenge. This early practical experience of archaeology would prove hugely influential in developing his multidisciplinary methodology.
In late September 1928, having secured a lectureship at Queen's, he arrived in Belfast and began to revolutionise geographical studies. According to geographer Prof Annegret Simms, Estyn Evans is the founding father of Irish geography.
"His great contribution is the creation of a landscape school. The landscape was his main source of evidence. He did not research written documents. His work was based on fieldwork and focused on traditional rural settlement patterns and house types along the north west fringe of Ireland. He was, and is, central."
FOR HIS CRITICS, Evans confined his study to Ulster and was "overly" conscious of the Border between North and South. Yet this seems narrow-minded. His vision of Ireland, based on the preservation of a rapidly disappearing rural tradition, was far wider than that. He identified the links between the scholarly and the social. Evans was central to the founding of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Cultra, Co Down.
His archaeological work was much admired within the archaeological community; some geographers regarded him as more of an archaeologist than a geographer. Evans, who was the first professor of geography at Queen's University from 1945 until 1968, the year he became the first director of the university's Institute of Irish Studies, wrote widely on Ireland. Irish Folk Ways was published in 1957. Prehistoric and Early Christian Ireland followed in 1966, while The Personality of Ireland (1973) enjoys an almost cult status.
The legacy of Emyr Estyn Evans, the romantic possessed of practical vision, is undercut by an intense study of life as lived through the cultural signposts that determine identity. He saw the cultural relevance in gate posts and hedges. His regional consciousness both defined and defied boundaries. The lively curiosity he brought to his investigation of the Mourne region shapes his work. It was Evans who wrote: "A yew tree, a woman's tongue and the track made by a spade, these are three things that will last forever."
Mourne Country by E Estyn Evans is reissued by Dundalgan Press (€35)