The Rural Space

Title page of a recent edition of The Deserted Village.

Title page of a recent edition of The Deserted Village.This is autographed by Seamus Heaney and shows the continuing influence of Goldsmith's work.It also has a foreword by Vona Groarke and is illustrated by Blaise Drummond.

Title page of a recent edition of The Deserted Village.

Title page of a recent edition of The Deserted Village.

Title page of a recent edition of The Deserted Village.This is autographed by Seamus Heaney and shows the continuing influence of Goldsmith's work.It also has a foreword by Vona Groarke and is illustrated by Blaise Drummond.

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Rushy fields in Fawnavoy Upper

Black and white photograph showing Mt Errigal, Co Donegal, in the background. Photographed by Dutch photographic artist Jan Voster in collaboration with Donegal author Cathal O Searcaigh. The region where this photograph was taken is Fawnavoy Upper, in O Searcaigh’s home ground. Mt Errigal can be compared to Mt Fuji in the shape of its outline. In the foreground can be seen the overgrowth of rushes on what was once fertile farmland. O Searcaigh regrets the dying out of tillage in the area, and says in the text accompanying this scene: “The starved soil of much of the farmlands has become infected by an epidemic of rushes. Like an army they rout the field and then they amass themselves there in solid formation, a seedy self-seeking legion…I’m nostalgic for a whole way of life that is vanishing. And with it goes a whole accumulation of wisdom about handling stock and sowing seeds.”

Copyright Donegal County Council/Clo Iar-Chonnachta

Rushy fields in Fawnavoy Upper
Copyright Donegal County Council/Clo Iar-Chonnachta

Rushy fields in Fawnavoy Upper

Black and white photograph showing Mt Errigal, Co Donegal, in the background. Photographed by Dutch photographic artist Jan Voster in collaboration with Donegal author Cathal O Searcaigh. The region where this photograph was taken is Fawnavoy Upper, in O Searcaigh’s home ground. Mt Errigal can be compared to Mt Fuji in the shape of its outline. In the foreground can be seen the overgrowth of rushes on what was once fertile farmland. O Searcaigh regrets the dying out of tillage in the area, and says in the text accompanying this scene: “The starved soil of much of the farmlands has become infected by an epidemic of rushes. Like an army they rout the field and then they amass themselves there in solid formation, a seedy self-seeking legion…I’m nostalgic for a whole way of life that is vanishing. And with it goes a whole accumulation of wisdom about handling stock and sowing seeds.”

Copyright Donegal County Council/Clo Iar-Chonnachta

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Place is hugely important in Irish culture. Everyone is from somewhere and, as the writer Elizabeth Bowen declared, 'nothing happens nowhere'. Those involved in the Literary Revival were acutely aware of this importance and much of their art is a celebration of the local and the contours of place.

This Revivalist impulse recurs throughout 20th Century Irish writing with figures such as Seamus Heaney (1939) and Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) both consciously recreating their immediate world in their poetry. The small farming communities of Monaghan and Tyrone are thus celebrated and immortalised in their work. Each lovingly details the rhythms of the seasons and the work of the farm in their work: again, emphasising that it is out of the ordinary and the everyday that poetry and art can spring.

However, the focus on the countryside and on the rural to the exclusion of other spaces and places has meant that Ireland and Irishness is sometimes presented as the preserve of those who reside in the countryside, especially in the West of Ireland.

Patrick Kavanagh's long poem 'The Great Hunger' (1942) shatters the image of the happy peasant, close to the soil and to nature. His vision is of a world of stunted lives, of lives far too bound up with the land for land's sake. The consequences are that the other areas of life and experience are ignored and remain barren: the life of the imagination and the physical life of love are ignored at great cost.

More recently, Eden, a play by Eugene O'Brien allows a world that has been overlooked in much Irish writing to come to the stage. Here is depicted a small town in midland Ireland, where voice is given to a married couple, both of whom have dreams and hopes unfulfilled.