A book about an ancient Irish stone wall is itself a monument to craftsmanship, writes Mary Finn.
Stone walls are surely as iconically Irish as the harp, shamrock or wolfhound. There are inexhaustible miles of them, the land's exo-skeleton in limestone, sandstone, granite, our never-ending Great Wall. Neolithic farmers raised dry stone walls around the 5,000-year-old Céide Fields enclosure in Co Mayo; Irish emigrants brought the technique to the bluegrass states of Kentucky and Tennessee (and, according to some folklorists, may have brought with them an Irish-language prototype of poet Robert Frost's proverb "Good fences make good neighbours"). Yet in their very familiarity, stone walls absent themselves from our gaze like the grass they rise from.
As always, it takes an outsider to hold the mirror. Swiss-born Dominique Lieb, artist, photographer, publisher and printer, describes the conception of Allagar na gCloch/Stone Chat, an illustrated bilingual book launched recently at Forás na Gaeilge.
"I thought the stone walls covered Ireland like a sculpture, yet they are so much part of it that nobody sees them anymore. I found this particular wall running beside a pilgrim path near Mount Eagle in Kerry and I took photographs that I liked; it was exceptionally beautiful, I thought. But I needed somebody to decode it for me."
In local poet, writer, farmer and boat-builder Domhnall (Danny) Mac Síthigh, she found her stone translator. Reluctant at first, he walked the length of sandstone wall that Lieb had photographed.
"I was overtaken by the wall," Mac Síthigh says, "the way it lay into the land, the views that came with following it. I had never really seen any art to the walls around before, but as I went along the path I found I was seeing the stone arrangements properly for the first time and as I did that it became clear to me that there had been many different hands at work along stretches of the wall. I began to picture their stories from the way they laid the stones, and the landscape they set them in. I had to believe too that some of them were my ancestors, setting the farmland apart from the commonage, protecting their animals with all the care and art they had."
Out of the stones, Mac Síthigh conjures a seal watcher, a sailor, a man at odds with his wife, a mystic, each one "ag briseadh, ag baint, ag bailiú, ag tógaint ar an mbuncloch/blasting, removing, gathering, building on the bedrock".
Lieb transformed her photographs by computer and special plates into subtly grained images that suggest the tactile quality of stone. A book with 44 paired images of a wall, text running above (Irish on every left-hand page, on the right the English translation by Caitriona Ní Chathail), requires no small effort of production.
Allagar na gCloch works in three approved languages - Irish, English and the images that began the project. But a fourth becomes apparent immediately the book is handled. The language of book design, where font and space, paper and binding, form a grammar as essential as the starting elements of picture and word, needs no translation but pleasure.
Launching the book, the historian and calligrapher Tim O'Neill praised the choices that had gone into the design, noting the rounded Uncial typeface of the Irish and the clear Roman uprights of the English. "Type does something for Irish," he said afterwards. "Choosing a font that recalls the oldest kind of writing in these islands reveals the true craft of bookmaking. I would say Dominique brings that medieval notion of right attention to the art."
A successful graphic designer in Lausanne, what Lieb describes as a "life crisis" brought her to west Kerry, where her mother was living. A year ago she bought Púca Press, a small printer whose mainstay was stationery, flyers, posters. But Púca Press stood on the back of giants. Via Liam Miller's Dolmen Press, it has a direct line to Dun Emer/Cuala Press, the Arts and Crafts letterpress printing company run by the Yeats sisters, Lily and Lolly.
When Dolmen shut up shop in 1988, former employee Stan Phelan took some of the printing equipment to Dingle and set up Hawthorne Press. The same machinery had been acquired by Miller from Cuala Press in the early 1950s. So the early 20th-century press that had published works by WB and Jack Yeats, Lady Gregory, Ezra Pound and Patrick Kavanagh now operates in narrow River (formerly Púca) Lane in Dingle.
"We have things here that I haven't even found yet," says Lieb. "I'm told there are illustration plates by Jack Yeats, and somewhere there is also the Golden typeface that was so loved by William Morris. Even though of course I use computers and I certainly wouldn't care to use the lithopress all the time, still I love handcrafted work."
For the bookbinding, Lieb called in the services of American book artist Sandra Landers, also a Corca Dhuibhne resident. Landers specialises in hand-made creations which have been exhibited as works of art; she also teaches bookbinding. "Allagar na gCloch is a simple non-glue binding, a signature binding," she says. "You can open it and it holds. There is a kind of magic in making or finishing a book: you must keep faith with it."
Lieb laughs at the timing of her purchase of Púca Press. "It couldn't really have been a worse time from the point of view of ordinary printing jobs," she says. "People can do so much on their own computers now. But perhaps some writers or poets might look at what we can offer that is different from the ordinary. And maybe one day I will convince somebody to give Púca Press a grant!"
Allagar na gCloch/Stone Chat, €30, is in a limited edition of 500, from Café Liteartha in Dingle, and Púca Press (www.pucapress.com)
