Plan to turn the Irish Borderlands into a UNESCO ‘literary area’ | books

TThe border between Ireland and Northern Ireland used to attract smugglers, paramilitaries, police and soldiers, but its landscape of winding lanes and hedgerows may soon attract a new kind of visitor: literary pilgrims.

A plan is being drawn up to rename it as Ireland’s Northern Literary Lands and create the world’s first UNESCO literary region.

Arts Over Borders, a group that organizes festivals on both sides of the border, aims to create nine “literary routes” to guide travelers through 11 counties that have produced or inspired writers ranging from Jonathan Swift to Samuel Beckett and Lisa McGee.

“We have a constellation of exceptional writers associated with the Border Provinces,” said Sean Doran, the group’s artistic director. “We are uncovering a map of this heritage – an unprecedented concentration of literary greatness crammed into one small corner of Europe.”

Doran hopes the rebranding of the 310-mile border, which has been affected by unrest and Brexit, will encourage residents to learn about shared cultural heritage and attract visitors to villages and towns that lie off the usual tourist trail.

The nine roads or routes include the ‘Noble Way’ encompassing parts of Sligo, County Fermanagh and County Derry associated respectively with W. B. Yeats, Beckett and Seamus Heaney. The ‘Poetic Method’ takes in the areas of Monaghan, Tyrone and Derry associated with Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon, John Montague and Tom Bullen.

“Wilde’s Romantic Way” involves a walking route through Enniskillen, the Fermanagh town where Oscar Wilde attended boarding school and on which he based his children’s story The Happy Prince.

“We’re putting this out there for people to choose and make their own trips,” Duran said. “The nine roads intersect and you can do all of them in one day. It’s a way to highlight how to connect the dots.”

The initiative will include upcoming festivals such as the Beckett Biennial, which will include the first Scots-Ulster translation of Waiting for Godot.

Doran, who co-authored A Rough Guide to Ireland in the 1980s, is preparing a new independent guide to the literature route. In addition to the map of the greats, there will be contemporary writers, such as novelist Maggie O’Farrell, from Derry, and Donegal poet Anne Mary Ní Churain.

The ‘Northern Literary Lands’ – a concept conceived by Doran with his late colleague Liam Browne – includes five counties in Northern Ireland and six in the Republic. It comprises a third of the island’s land area and a mostly rural population of 1.2 million.

Duran said foreign visitors flock to the coasts – marketed by tourism authorities as the “Old East” and the “Wild Atlantic Way” – but often ignore the provinces in between. He added: “These are hidden strongholds.”

Other regions around the world have a rich literary heritage, but few, if any, have the intensity of the Irish border regions, Doran said. Some authors, such as playwright Brian Friel, are closely associated with the area, while others, such as Beckett, stayed for only a few years.

The ‘Spiritual Way’ includes Neolithic rock art at Newgrange, stone iconography at Monasterbois, the Morne Mountains, which inspired C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and sites in Armagh associated with Swift. The nearby Cooley Peninsula is associated with the legendary Táin Bó Cúailnge saga.

“North-West Dramatic Method” brings together George Farquhar, who wrote Restoration-era comedies, and creator of the TV shows Derry Girls and How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. “Farquhar and McGee, separated by three centuries but with such a connection,” Doran said.

UNESCO recognizes 63 “literary cities”, including Abuja, Dublin, Edinburgh, Norwich and Tangier. Arts Across Borders will petition the UN agency to create a new regional category, starting with the Irish border.