Reigniting the lost language of County Louth landscape

The minor places project is a scheme that reignites the interconnectedness of the Irish cultural landscape and focuses on the misunderstanding of place and language. The project is the investigation of a landscape using the representational tools of its language, its stones, the Shepard, and the architect. The project highlights knowledge, through The Stones of Carlingford pamphlet, and looks to create an alternative cultural landscape which views the “same landscape in a different language”.

Upon visiting Carlingford, I become controlled with the layers upon layers of dry-stone walling, creating fields and boundaries all hand placed by the ordinary person of the past. Mapping and following the sprawl of stone I began to unearth a substratum of folklore and the lost past of the Irish landscape. After relocating and reigniting the voices of the past I believed it to be important to foreground their sounds once again, using the architecture as the tool for communication.

My proposal lays within a small field on the body of slieve foye, Cooley’s peninsula largest hill, where three small huts are located fitting within the wider minor places scheme. Here, an old derelict shepherds hut in a ruined state overlooks Carlingford and its layers of stone, agriculture, history, and character. In order to achieve the reignition of the cultural landscape and its language I looked to the Irish National Folklore Collection to uncover lost stories and narratives once spoken through the land. I found stories like the Carlingford’s son and their goat skin shoes, which then correlates to a goat skin membrane surrounding the original hut preserving and protecting its current state, as well as preserving its lost history and voices. I also uncovered other moments like Monk Donard and the celebration of the stone which are all spread across 3 separate Booleys (Gaelic word for temporary huts) and are shown through designed out moments within the project. I looked to unearth a substratum of local identity and vernacular styles of architecture which stretches back from the past all the way to present day, this becomes the influencer in form, moments, and the construction of the huts.

Upon reflection, this scheme becomes an initiator in the reconnection of the ordinary Irish person and their lost past. Small Booleys given the freedom to each express their own individual stories or narratives in a makeshift open-air museum, each individual in their speech but become a cluster all expressing an element of the landscape’s language. Not just benefiting the foregrounding of the Irish past, the scheme also brings an economic and tourism boom to the town in and around the cooley peninsula, resulting in a sustainable project which looks to promote the landscape, the people, and the past.