AT its best, the prose of Estyn Evans is a model of good mannered persuasiveness and lucidity.
"The flowering whitethorn - the sacred tree of Ireland - has associations both of colour and scent with milk and with cows and similarly a host of golden wild flowers which followed in man's footsteps - gorse, primrose, marsh marigold and dandelion - were marginally connected with butter and figured in the May festivals; garlands of golden flowers known as summer were sometimes tied to cows' tails. There is a beauty as well as a wealth of magic in the gold of May and again in the bronze of November.
Evans remains a towering figure in the intellectual history of 20th century Ireland. His main books, Irish Heritage (1942), Mourne Country (1951), Irish Folkways (1957) and The Personality of Ireland (1973), are all classics, but they form only a part of a rich six decades of publishing. This tireless Welshman was also an outstanding and much loved teacher, and a decisive influence behind the journals Ulster Folklife and the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, as well as the establishment of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and the Institute of Irish Studies. Evans was also a sane voice in the troubled trajectory of 20th century Ulster, constantly stressing the enduring common ground underneath the two traditions.
As John Campbell's sympathetic survey in this volume emphasises, his constant theme was the interplay between habitat (the physical environment), heritage (the unwritten but transmitted past) and history (in the high political sense). Evans's strength lay in his negotiation of the borderlands between anthropology, geography and history. At a time when Irish historians found it difficult to cut loose from their Oxbridge leading strings, there was something bracing and mature about Evans's French inspired intelligence.
Evans remained more securely rooted in natural history than in the social sciences; field evidence took precedence over all other types - including documents. The landscape was always the common ground where nature and culture met, a braille from whose surface could be deduced the codes of an entire culture. Unlike his distinguished successor, Tim Robinson, Evans never felt the need to learn the Irish language; there is something austere in his adherence to the cold facts of the landscape without its warm overlay of myth, memory and symbol.
The current volume contains a selection of Evans's writings, about half of it previously unpublished. While Ireland's Atlantic heritage is a unifying theme, the editorial principles are neither explicit nor transparent. Missing here, for example, are three of his greatest contributions on this topic - "Donegal Survivals" (1939), "The Ecology of Peasant Life in Western Europe" (1956), "The Atlantic Ends of Europe" (1958). The new pieces range from the occasional to the seminal ("Atlantic Europe: The Pastoral Heritage"). The shorter pieces are sharply observed and are often humorous, while the larger pieces are vintage Evans; witness the highly skilled compression of "The Kingdom of Mourne", as beautiful a piece of regional writing as has ever appeared on Ireland.
Inevitably, Evans's focus on survivals among the "people without history" lends an archaic feel to some of his pieces. His insistence on millennial continuities contributes to the feeling that Evans sees himself as the benign custodian of an open air museum in the rural West.
We are now more aware of the modernity of the West of Ireland culture, of the fractures and dislocations inflicted by a colonial history and of the sharply differentiated class structure of the Irish countryside. Ploughing an often lonely furrow in the narrow ground of Ulster, Evans's avoidance of history in favour of heritage and habitat may have been a necessary and indeed liberating protocol, but it conferred a freedom not untinged with loss.
His best known book, The Personality of Ireland, is too prone to easy generalisations, too impatient before the stubborn facts of history; his real masterwork is Mourne Country, in which his disciplined, concentrated and always sympathetic focus elicited the single best regional monograph in the English language in the 20th century.
This is an always readable and attractive volume, which consolidates Evans's well deserved reputation as an accessible and instructive scholar.
Kevin Whelan's most recent book is The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760-1830. {CORRECTIONS} 96072400076
