Irish Language Cartography Centre

On the contested Irish border in Béal Leice (Belleek) an Ionad Cartagrafaíochta Gaeilge (Irish Language Cartography Centre) translates the former Royal Ulster Constabulary Station and British Army Outpost into a map-making centre, gallery, and town kitchen recovering past practices and experiences of the Irish Landscape through the Irish Language. To read the Irish landscape in English is to lose a wealth of knowledge in the specific nuances of Irish landscape and language.

The Ordnance Survey – imperial military mapping of Eire, Ireland – foregrounded efficiency and accuracy, whereby the violence of phonetical translation into English disconnected placename from place and culture from landscape. The highly fortified former Royal Ulster Constabulary station in the border town of Béal Leice, meaning Mouth of the Flagstones, is an uncomfortable reminder of the military history of the contested Irish border, which came about via intelligence gained from the Ordnance Survey.

Placing an Irish language cartography centre on the RUC site conceptually dissolves that border, proposing new maps of Eire, Ireland that detail the native language and culture. The site will house a cross-border place-name research office; and an Irish Language map-making cartography studio, both in the concrete shell of the former police station, the strategic heart of the site. A gallery displaying maps in the Irish language and educational and library facilities support the research and function of the cartography centre, whilst a cartography residency places it into the global context of decolonial cartographies. Locally, a town kitchen and permeable landscape strategy open the security-protected site to the town and restore the view of the river Erne. The proposal was designed through a series of translations, creating a bold visual translation of the former RUC station into a culturally restorative centre for the Irish Landscape. Programmatically, the proposed layout is based on the former arrangement of the RUC station. Materially, local natural materials have been used such as earth walls, hay-rope, and thatch.

In a translation of landscape, the formerly fixed boundaries of the security-protected site on the river are blurred; the site’s military past is boldly subverted, as Native wildflowers thrive in the bomb-blasted soils. Nevertheless, the historic usage of the site is on full display, allowing public observation to subvert the watchful military gaze on the town, with hay-rope facades extrapolating the previous form and thatch towers breaking through to create public viewpoints around the site.