Social HistoryThis lavishly produced book, produced by the Clachan Committee of the Glens of Antrim Historical Society, is largely in a tradition familiar to the study of Ireland's rural past. The linked ideas that the human landscape can act as a text, recording the often undocumented history of social change, while any society must be referred to the space, place or region within which it lived, lay at the core of Estyn Evans's legacy to several generations of geographers of Ireland.
Using the integrative theme of the "clachan", A Wheen O'Things (a "goodly number") examines the social history of the Glens of Antrim from around Glenarm in the south to Ballycastle and Rathlin Island in the north during the period 1800-1950. As in many areas of Ireland, the clachan, the small unplanned cluster of rural houses, lacking church and services, was ubiquitous in the Glens during the 19th century, the study identifying some 46 examples (and there may well have been more).
PRODUCED PRIMARILY BY local people, the book synthesises the results of the "Clachan Project", carried out between 2004-2007. A number of contributors (perhaps under the direction of Bill Macafee but the book is determinedly democratic in its editorial anonymity) deal with such topics as: rural work and agriculture; the other occupations of the clachan dwellers, among whom were numbered thatchers, seamen and miners; the role of women in clachan lives; and the vernacular architecture of the settlements. Two chapters on flora and fauna and the Gaelic language somewhat compromise the clachan theme but are useful, nevertheless, in underpinning the ecology and society of the Glens.
While the focus of the study is firmly traditional - as epitomised by numerous citations to Evans's writings - it is given a contemporary resonance by UK Heritage Lottery Fund support and an excellent complementary website (www.antrimhistory.net). Very much to be commended is the involvement of local schoolchildren in a project that combines local history with electronic media. The book is also splendidly illustrated with line drawings and photographs from various archives, family collections and of the present landscape.
The straightforward use of the clachan as the linking theme is refreshing, even though most local people in the Glens would, instead, use "town". "Clachan" is a term that has passed out of academic fashion - as have the debates triggered by Evans's ideas on the origins and antiquity of nucleated and dispersed rural settlement in Ireland. Beyond academe, however, it is a useful word that describes a common and very recognisable settlement form recorded throughout Ireland by the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s.
The Glens of Antrim, cut-off from the rest of the north of Ireland by the Antrim Plateau and the rounded hulk of Knocklayd, appear ostensibly as an isolated area in which the poorly documented rural practices and customs of everyday lives might have survived, now to be reclaimed from a study of clachan settlements, rural artefacts, social customs and folklore.
SUCH EVERYDAY ACTIVITIES, however, did not define the entirety of the clachan-dwellers' world and there is a sense here that the structural adherence to the clachan theme, with its connotations of locality, can get in the way of the social history of the Glens. Locally, the area and its inhabitants were integrated into wider social networks - those of the landlords, of the small towns with their shopkeepers, hucksters and traders, of the state with its pharmacies and schools, and the politics of religion and identity that were emerging through the 19th century.
Industrial capitalism, too, had touched the Glens in the iron ore mining on the Antrim Plateau and the industrial tramway down to Red Bay. By the 1870s, the narrow-gauge railway from Ballymena had reached Retreat above Cushendall, providing another means for the export of iron ore and, later, for day-trippers to visit the tea-rooms at Glenariff. More widely - as the book readily demonstrates - the clachans were part of broader social and geographical networks forged through emigration and the proximity to Scotland (then served by regular sailings from Cushendun to the Mull of Kintyre).
The book demonstrates the lasting influence of Evans's ideas on the ways in which people "see" their countryside. But it shows, too, that the legacy is perhaps too enduring in that the entirety of the social history of the clachan-dwellers of the Glens cannot be defined only from within. Nor, indeed, can the social history of the Glens be described solely through the lens of the clachan. Nevertheless, such qualifications should not unduly detract from the achievements of A Wheen O'Things. It is to be commended as a most readable, soundly researched, dedicated and superbly produced study of the pays that is the Glens of Antrim.
Brian Graham is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Ulster. His latest book, Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies (with GJ Ashworth and JE Tunbridge), was published by Pluto Press in 2007
A Wheen O'Things That Used to Be: A Social History of the Clachan Settlements of the Glens of Antrim, 1800-1950 Eds. Clachan Committee, Glens of Antrim Historical Society Glens of Antrim Historical Society, 164pp. £10