Episode 1 Great Irish Journeys with Martha Kearney

Ireland's beauty has captivated artists and writers for centuries.

It's easy to see why.

I'm Martha Kearney and I was born in Ireland,

but I left when I was a small child,

so in the course of this series,

I'm hoping to rediscover the land that I once called home.

My guide is going to be a 19th-century Irishman.

He was an artist and surveyor

and he made it his life's work

to chronicle the country's landmarks and treasurers.

His name was George Victor Du Noyer.

Du Noyer was part of a team

which undertook a ground-breaking series of surveys in Ireland.

Mapping its landscape

and its geology,

but Du Noyer was also an accomplished artist

and he was inspired by all that he saw in his travels.

His work is like a memory map of the country as it once was.

Thanks to Du Noyer, we can see the landscape as it was 150 years ago

with its open spaces and ancient sites.

In the middle of the Victorian period, a time of massive change,

he travelled the country,

across its mountains,

through the bogland

and along the spectacular coastline,

and I will follow in his footsteps.

Ireland's haunting beauty is legendary.

In recent years, I've mainly come here as a journalist,

but I still find the landscape stunning.

Du Noyer was born in 1817 in Dublin.

He trained as an artist

and put his talents to use

in the two hugely ambitious projects of 19th-century Ireland,

the Ordnance Survey and Geological Survey.

He spent the next 35 years on the road,

mapping and sketching the country.

Du Noyer made thousands of drawings en route.

These include panoramic views, contemporary buildings,

ancient monuments, rock formations

and even the Irish people.

The Victorians had an insatiable appetite for documenting the past,

and Du Noyer was certainly a man of his age.

He came from Dublin, and that's where I'm starting my journey

to find out more about the man.

In the mid-19th century, intellectual life was booming.

There was such huge progress being made in science, art, archaeology,

and in fact, in the first half of the 19th century here in Dublin,

a number of new institutions of learning, academies

were being set up, and this was one of them.

-Hi, there.

-Martha.

-Good to see you.

-Nice to meet you.

It looks like you've got a real treasure trove here

for us to work through,

which will give us a sense of just the range of Du Noyer's work.

Well, Du Noyer was a polymath. He was interested in everything.

He was trained as an artist by a gentleman named George Petrie

and George Petrie got him

interested in archaeology,

and so although he was working

mainly as a geologist,

he was interested, and painting absolutely everything that he saw,

so for example, here we've got

some of his own little notebooks, his own personal notebooks,

which again, he was doing while he was travelling around

-with the Geological Survey.

-Oh, look, the women in their cloaks.

The top hats, yeah.

So this is an example of Macroom, which is a town in Cork.

It says here, "January from 1853".

He was noting down the archaeology,

he was drawing the landscapes,

he was annotating what was actually happening in the villages

and the towns of the time.

So we get a really amazing sense

-of what mid-19th century Ireland would have looked like.

-Absolutely.

How was he travelling around the country?

Well, he travelled mainly on horseback but once he got to a place,

as all geologists of the time, they went out and walked the fields.

Many of them said it was actually easier to do geology when it was wet

because the rocks were wet and you could see the colour of them better.

-Tough old life!

-Absolutely, absolutely tough life.

Sounds quite a lonely existence tramping the fields,

often in wet weather. What do you think kept his spirits up?

I think his curiosity,

his love and his desire to understand the geology,

to understand the archaeology,

to understand what was going on in the landscape,

and of course he had his little dog.

-Did he?

-He did, of course.

Oh!

MARTHA LAUGHS

-Fantastic!

-His name was Mr Buff,

and he went everywhere with him.

You can see how much he loved this dog here,

so we've got a beautiful watercolour of Mr Buff.

-He's actually called Buffer here.

-Buffer, yeah.

-"Thoughtful Buffalo", does it say?

-Yes, "Thoughtful Buffalo"!

So I thing that Mr Buff also kept him going.

He was the companion that was constantly with him.

You can imagine these two going through the Irish fields

in the 19th century.

But he wanted to document things.

He wanted to record what was there

because he knew that Ireland was changing, that all these new things,

all these new railways, all these new roads were being built,

and we were going to lose some of what was there, that he treasured.

What makes Du Noyer's work truly special

was that he was recording a pivotal time in Ireland's history.

The traditional way of life that had remained unchanged for centuries was

being eroded by the revolutionary changes of the Victorian era.

Men and machines were beginning to transform the landscape irrevocably.

Du Noyer witnessed all of this first-hand as he surveyed the land.

Mapping Ireland, recording its landscape, natural history,

geology and archaeology, was a massive project.

Du Noyer devoted 35 years to the task.

It was the first time that a project of this scale

had ever been attempted.

It's very much part of

a 19th-century sensibility of surveying landscape,

surveying people,

and a culture of science that really emerges.

It's very much part of the vocabulary of geography,

of exploration, of travel,

so instead of going across the landscape,

now they're going down into it,

and of course this is the period as well of great road-building,

of canal-building and later railway-building in Ireland.

It's a whole history of transportation that's happening

and the Ordnance Survey are moving along those pathways.

England had nothing comparable to the Ordnance Survey

and I think it's remarkable

that within a mere - what? - 10, 15 years or so,

that the survey had not only mapped the whole of Ireland

but had also amassed a team of experts who were

able to go out into the field, who were able to note down place names,

able to note down local lore.

If you like, it's a whole new description of a country

and a complete description of a country at one particular time

just before the famine.

Looking out over this gorgeous landscape

in Skibbereen in west Cork,

it's hard to believe that 160 years ago,

it was filled with scenes of unimaginable horror.

Millions of people starved during the Great Potato Famine.

It was the cataclysmic disaster in Ireland's history.

Before the famine, Ireland had been a country of eight million people.

Most of them grew their own food

on small plots attached to their homes.

The staple diet was easy to grow

and thrived in Ireland's damp weather - the humble potato.

But the vegetable was susceptible to blight.

In 1847, the disease struck.

Deprived of food, a million died a slow, lingering death.

People living without hope walled themselves into their houses

and starved to death.

Four million others left the country, many never to return.

In Du Noyer's work, though, there are no images of starving people,

no harrowing pictures.

His images of the famine all tend to look like this -

drawings of roofless and abandoned cottages.

Throughout his vast work,

there's barely a hint that it ever actually happened.

But that begs an interesting question - given that Du Noyer

was working and travelling in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy,

why do we see so few visual examples of it in his work?

For a start, Du Noyer was more interested in the landscape

and the artefacts in the landscape than

he was in painting the human figure,

but to widen it from Du Noyer,

most other artists didn't paint scenes of great poverty in Ireland

either, or devastation, I think partly because

the academic training, if they had it,

concentrated on painting the classical figure.

They hadn't the skills for painting, you know, absolute destitution

and emaciation and people dying of disease and so on

and some kind of, just horror of painting such awful,

you know, soul-destroying misery.

Du Noyer may have steered clear of the famine in his work,

but there was an Irish artist from this very area who was

depicting the most graphic images of the kind of gruelling poverty that

people were undergoing, but then he was sending his pictures to London.

We rely a lot on primary source accounts,

people who came here to tell us what was happening during the Great Famine

and probably the person who had most effect was James Mahoney

of the Illustrated London News,

and he visited Skibbereen at the height of the Great Famine

in early 1847, and what he sketched

and described literally horrified people and it had a profound effect.

The Illustrated London News was a new type of media

and it had images, obviously,

and today I suppose we'd call him a photojournalist.

In those days, he sketched what he saw

and Skibbereen made the front page of the Illustrated London News

and in today's terms, these images went viral,

they went all over the Empire. You know, Africa, Asia, India, Canada,

and huge amounts of money started to flow into Ireland

and Skibbereen became very famous,

synonymous with the famine through these images and descriptions.

Even now, in one corner of Skibbereen,

the famine still feels very real.

What is it we're looking out on here?

So this entire area here is one mass grave,

famine burial pits, as they're known. In this area

there's somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 people buried.

-Seriously? In this small area?

-Yeah.

To give you a perspective,

there's about 2,000 people in Skibbereen today,

-so this is huge.

-It's huge.

There's two other mass graves in Skibbereen, one up at Chapel Lane

and one at the workhouse itself, so it's just one of three,

estimated about 28,000 dead in this area.

So it must have been absolutely devastating for the families

to know that your parents' or your children's bodies were just

thrown into a mass pit like this.

Well, burial in Ireland was very, very important.

It was part of the psyche,

so, yes, this was an aberration in Irish terms.

There was a terrible shame attached to the famine, wasn't there,

-in the years that followed?

-There was, there was.

They call it the Great Silence.

People didn't speak about the famine, you know, they put up this wall.

Today we have a name for it, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder.

In those days, I think it was a combination of things.

I think it was survivor's guilt. Also, people did things

that were so out of their normal realm of behaviour

that they couldn't think about it.

It turned into this bitterness, which fuelled a lot of revolution

and war afterwards, so you can understand it, though.

We find it hard to imagine this nowadays

because we look around the Irish rural landscape

and it is largely, as it were, a green and pleasant land.

Then, it was the most densely populated place in Europe

and that's kind of hard for us to imagine.

Most of the homes of the people who lived in Ireland in the 1830s,

1840s, are utterly invisible today

because they were literally mud cabins,

so to walk around an Irish hillside, you would have seen

literally hundreds of dwellings, hundreds of dwellings,

where nowadays you might see half a dozen isolated farmsteads.

Like most other artists, Du Noyer didn't paint famine victims,

possibly out of respect for their misery.

His pictures showed quiet unpopulated areas,

reminiscent of simpler times.

He was drawn to wilderness, to peaceful contemplative scenes,

and there was one place to which the artist kept returning,

the extraordinary valley of Glendalough,

where the beauty of the Wicklow Mountains

evokes a unique spirituality.

This really is such a stunning view.

I can see why Du Noyer came here to capture it

in one of all those vignettes he did of Wicklow.

As much as he knew about geology, and he did for his time,

it was still an infant science, so he'd have been astonished

to find out that this valley was formed by a glacier.

Glendalough is a really important place for me,

because it's such a romantic location for my parents.

They met at university in Dublin

and came down here in a rickety old bus on their second date,

and I'm not entirely convinced it was all about archaeology.

In the sixth century, this place was discovered by a monk,

St Kevin, who wanted somewhere quiet for prayer and contemplation.

He certainly found it.

The valley flourished as a religious centre for 600 years,

each generation adding their own chapels and shrines.

The round tower is one of the most perfectly preserved in the country.

My own parents visited Glendalough 60 years ago.

Every summer, archaeological students from their old college

in Dublin still come here to dig,

and leader Graeme Warren has a link to my family past.

Thank you very much for coming to see us.

We do have a photograph from, which I think is 1954.

That's my dad!

-Hiding away in the background of it there.

-Thank you so much!

-That's really good research.

-Not at all.

Just to put us in context, the community of St Kevin,

this was very early Christianity, wasn't it, for Ireland?

St Kevin and the foundation would be one of the classic

early monastic settlements.

It's a landscape that people still see as spiritually

very important today.

There's a landscape of the imagination here

as well as the physical reality of a stunningly beautiful landscape

that you see around you now.

The round tower that we can see here is a particularly fine example.

It is a particularly fine example. It's slightly reconstructed.

If you look at 19th-century photographs of it,

it doesn't have the roof.

And that's one of the things that happens a lot,

is the well-meaning actions

restored, repaired, changed these monuments a little bit,

which is why some of Du Noyer's pictures capture aspects

of that landscape before all of those changes have taken place,

and they can be very valuable for us.

Let's just go back then to George Du Noyer's day.

He came here, clearly had an interest in antiquity,

but I suppose his interest in antiquity

would have been quite typical for someone of his time.

Often, although not exclusively, this would be men

of a certain social class.

Some of the accounts of antiquarian activity we have in this valley

are from William Wilde.

In reading those narratives,

you do get a sense of the way this was a part of their identity,

who they were as individuals,

was to hold this interest in the past and to be able to talk

about those sorts of things

and to speak knowledgeably about that material.

It's difficult to be certain, of course,

whether people who do the kind of thing that Du Noyer did,

did it because they were aware that this was a vulnerable heritage,

or whether they were interested in it for its own sake.

It seems to have been an urge to look back to an earlier time

in Ireland's history, perhaps because of an emergence

in the 19th century of a concept of an Irish nation

that was broader than any that had existed in an earlier period.

This is one of those more vulnerable places to which Du Noyer was drawn,

a very special part of the Irish landscape, the boglands.

The Irish bog is like nothing else I've seen.

It reminds me of a landscape straight out of Tolkien's Middle-earth.

There's something truly fantastical about it.

In ancient Ireland, it was regarded as a liminal place,

a threshold between the living and the dead.

Simply put a foot wrong on this kind of ground,

you might never be seen again.

Du Noyer drew the strata of the bog,

but it held other secrets in its depths, as he would soon discover.

This is a quintessential part of the Irish landscape, the bog,

and it's so strange to walk in it, I can't tell you!

It's a kind of heathery bouncy castle.

It actually makes me feel slightly tipsy!

The bog has a very special place in Irish culture.

Seamus Heaney wrote, "But bog meaning soft,

"the fall of windless rain, pupil of amber."

It's also an incredibly rich resource.

People come to places like this to dig up turf

to put on their fires,

which give off that wonderful smell of peat smoke,

which I remember so well from our family holidays.

Conservation officer Tadhg O Corcora

is taking me through a vital initiation rite of the bog...

A bit of water here now.

..getting wet.

First time you fall in is a celebration.

It really is like a special landscape.

I love looking around. When you look from a distance,

it's quite brown, a little bit of green,

but then close-up, there are amazing colours.

Once you get into it, there's massive colour change all over,

so these are the heathers all starting to come out.

-They give you the little sea of pink.

-And then this bright orange.

The bright orange is the asphodel,

and that two months ago would have been all yellow.

That's sphagnum moss here.

And why is the moss important?

The moss is the key bog-building plant here..

The only bit that grows is the flowering head.

This, as it gets older and older, gets pushed down

further and further, that's what's turned in to peat.

You're standing here on about approximately 7.1 metres of peat.

Basically, your bog grows about a millimetre a year on average,

so a millimetre a year is basically a metre every 1,000 years.

10,000 years equals 10 metres.

What would you say that the landscape of the bog

means for people in Ireland?

The bogs, or peatlands anyway,

make up 20% of all of Ireland's land core.

They are synonymous with Ireland

and a lot of people can relate to bogs.

Ireland has a big history with bogs,

particularly I suppose through the coating of turf.

So as a fuel source.

Are there stories associated with the bogs, I mean, mythology?

They were long associated with burial grounds

and offerings were placed and people were buried with offerings.

The ancient Celts were pagans who honoured the forces of nature.

The bogs exerted a special power.

One characteristic of the bog is its unique ability

to preserve whatever lies within it.

It acts like nature's very own museum,

yielding up what people put into it.

A hoard of wood, metal, jewellery and even food.

Typically, Du Noyer was fascinated by these artefacts and drew them,

but more recently there have been other discoveries.

The slightly macabre bog bodies.

There's well over 100 bog bodies which have been found in Irish bogs,

dating from various different periods,

particularly the later prehistoric period, around the time of Christ,

a couple of centuries either side.

Some of them may have been people who just lost their way.

Others may have been ritually executed,

as a kind of an offering to the gods.

Others may have been social outcasts who had to be got rid of.

Who knows what other secrets lie beneath these bog lands?

In recording them, Du Noyer himself only really scratched the surface,

and as we'll discover throughout this series, the landscape itself

has a part to play in telling the story of Ireland.

If one landscape is as emblematic of Ireland as the bogland,

it's the rugged coastline.

The sharp angles and roughness of the edges of the island form

another important part of Du Noyer's work.

The sea is an integral part of life in Ireland -

80% of the population lives within ten kilometres of the coast -

and one of the most beautiful coastal spots

is Kinsale in County Cork.

You can see the life around here is just amazing.

Over there at the Old Head, we might see some dolphins or seals.

It's always worthwhile keeping a sharp lookout. You never know.

Every day's different. You never know what you'll see here.

-You never get bored doing what you do.

-Oh, no. No. I always say that.

This is the Old Head of Kinsale,

a long finger of rock that juts out into the ocean.

There are records of lighthouses here

dating back to pre-Christian Ireland.

In the 1850s, a new one was under construction.

And on his travels, Du Noyer had a chance

to sketch this striking addition to the landscape.

There's no doubt that the Old Head of Kinsale is an extraordinarily

dramatic promontory.

But it's quite interesting comparing it with the Du Noyer drawing,

because I think here he's taken a bit of dramatic licence,

because the way he has the sweep of the rocks rising right

out of the sea is certainly an exaggeration of what I'm looking at.

Du Noyer drew the Old Head of Kinsale when it was a new,

state-of-the-art lighthouse, a wonder of Victorian technology,

operated by highly-skilled keepers.

More than 160 years later, it's still working.

Just be careful of your head there, Martha.

Wow! This is incredible.

-Ooh!

-You feel like the sea is at your feet, don't you?

-You do.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

There's quite a tradition of lighthouse

-keeping in your family, isn't there?

-There is.

Yeah, my father was a lighthouse keeper,

and he served in land stations, he served in rock stations,

and we lived as families at the lighthouses.

He would be offshore on other stations,

and we'd have dwellings ashore.

And then every Sunday,

all the families were brought out on a boat, just sort of

a family day, to see the father, like, you know what I mean?

Everything, like, has changed completely as regard lighthouses now.

And why has that change happened, would you say?

Well, it's the technology, like,

you know? You don't need a man now to wind up the light.

We've got electricity. So electricity started, like,

so a totally different operation.

So...it's sad.

Why is it sad?

Well, for me it's sad because I lived at lighthouses when I was a child

and I grew up around lighthouses, and it was a great community,

so, like, we're fairly rare.

-We're the last, I'd say!

-You're the last remaining.

I would say we're the last, yeah. Yeah, it's looking like that.

It's in places like these that the distance between Du Noyer's

lifetime and my own somehow shrinks and I realise that the Ireland he

captured so vividly with his pencil and brush

hasn't vanished completely.

If we carried on heading out to sea from here, where would we come to?

If you go down this direction here, you'd come to another

lighthouse called the Fastnet Rock, and that was called the Teardrop.

When the people from Ireland used to be on the emigrant ships,

that's the last piece of Ireland they used to see,

so they used to call it the Teardrop.

There was a lot of tears there on the ships, like, you know?

It's thanks to Du Noyer's ceaseless travel

and meticulous watercolours that we can still imagine

the images of Ireland those emigrants were taking with them

on the ships.

The country they left behind, the boglands or mountainside,

may have changed in the years since, but with Du Noyer

as a guide, look hard enough and you can still get a glimpse.