The Burren, so lovingly chronicled by antiquarian TJ Westropp, should become a World Heritage site, argues Eileen Battersby
Another new motorway, another extended traffic jam, and more empty platitudes from an officialdom desperate to appear heritage-aware even as it is selling off one element of culture or undermining another. The current construction of a four-storey hotel across the road from the magnificent Anglo-Norman King John's Castle in Trim, Co Meath, is but a further sorry example of cultural betrayal.
Heritage, whether in the form of ancient monuments, the landscape, or our environment, has little chance in the face of development. The only hope, pathetically compromised as it so often is, lies in tourism. Tourists, from home and abroad are welcome to share the countryside - as long as they remember to take their refuse away with them. But a bigger threat than rubbish lies in the lasting impact of invasive visitor centres, which often amount to little more than short-term commercialism.
One such threat, however, was averted. The proposed centre at Mullaghmore, on the Burren in Co Clare, was the subject of an emotively divisive battle decided in the courts in 1993 and won by heritage, common sense and concern for the future. Though it is not a World Heritage site, no place in Ireland would be more deserving of such status than this clint-and-gryke limestone region of surreal natural wonder. Having been courageously protected from short-sighted exploitation, it survives in all its splendour and mystery. It is an evocative ancient landscape, a beautiful wilderness rich in geology and flora, yet for all its apparent remoteness, well-populated by ghosts. To explore the Burren is to visit a place where man lived and worked thousands of years ago. The story of the Burren is intimately linked with the archaeology of Ireland.
At the centre of the Burren stands one of the most famous megalithic tombs in Ireland, the Poulnabrone dolmen, or portal tomb. Beneath it lay the bones of around 20 people dated from between 3800 BC and 3200 BC, discovered during emergency conservation excavations begun in 1985. There is no doubt the first settlers on the Burren were Stone Age people. Christianity and the church-builders followed long after the tomb-builders had left their remarkable legacy. There are many fine guides to this special place: Tim Robinson's celebrated map; Averil Swinfen's Forgotten Stones (Dublin, 1992), her singular guide to the medieval church sites; and, most recently, Carleton Jones's authoritative The Burren and the Aran Islands: Exploring the Archaeology (Collins Press, 2004).
THESE ARE FINE companions, yet there is no voice more persuasive than that of the great Thomas Johnson Westropp, engineer and gentleman antiquarian, whose pioneering work on the area - as well as on the subject of Irish forts - remains essential reading. It is exciting to see Carleton Jones consistently referring to Westropp's work throughout his study, in which he reproduces many of Westropp's meticulous illustrations. Acknowledging the depth of Westropp's research and the volume of publications he produced throughout a life of dedication, Jones writes: "Not all antiquarians recorded with an equal concern for accuracy and Westropp once complained that 'the artist overpowered the antiquary' when discussing a drawing of Dún Aonghasa by the earlier antiquarian, George Petrie, where the scale of the drawing had been distorted."
There is no disputing that Westropp brought his engineer's eye to his drawings, but he also brought a passion for his subject to every line he wrote. In him, the earlier generation of antiquarians and scholars, such as Petrie, John O'Donovan and William Wilde, had a more than worthy successor. Westropp was concerned about the future and, as he became increasingly drawn to fieldwork, was determined to record as much as possible because he saw monuments being lost.
Yet little is known about him and he is a shocking, if uncharacteristic, omission from Henry Boylan's A Dictionary of Irish Biography. In 1999, Clasp Press, an Ennis publisher based in Clare County Library, published Archaeology of the Burren: Prehistoric Forts and Dolmens in North Clare, which consists of nine articles published by Westropp between 1895 and 1915 in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (he would become president of the society in 1916). It is not just a comprehensive, factual survey; along with his drawings, it contains colourful anecdotes and observations. Westropp was fascinated with folklore and balanced his scholarship with a love of tradition and a genuine interest in how people lived.
Clasp, which has also published Westropp's Folklore of Clare, has now reissued Archaeology of the Burren in a paperback edition, all the easier to take on a visit to north Co Clare as the detail makes it possible to plan a section-by- section exploration of the region. In her introduction, Carol Gleeson writes: "The person who begins any attempt at researching the history, archaeology and folklore of County Clare, and the Burren in particular, will invariably be led to the work of Thomas J Westropp." Paying tribute to his "scholarly and speculative mind, sense of humour and fresh approach to the recording of monuments", she argues that his "clear and balanced thinking contributed to the development of a more scientific approach to archaeology." As an engineer and surveyor, he drew accurately but with an artist's eye. He made effective use of the camera and his photographic record has been invaluable to generations of archaeologists. Gleeson applauds his legacy while regretting that "not more is known of the man". This gap has been filled to some extent by Mairéad Ashe FitzGerald's monograph, Thomas Johnson Westropp: An Irish Antiquary, published by UCD's department of archaeology in 2000.
IN FAIRNESS, ASHE FitzGerald also concedes that Westropp the man is elusive, his diary focusing mostly on his early life. He never married, and lived with his mother until her death before moving in with his married nephew's family. Yet if he was a private man, the scholar, fieldworker, recorder and enthusiast remains vibrantly present in his drawings and articles (of which he wrote more than 300, while never publishing a book). He appears to have had a great deal in common with Robert Lloyd Praeger, and participated in Praeger's pioneering project, the Clare Island Survey.
Westropp was born in 1860 into a large Anglo-Irish family who resided at Attyflin Park, Patrickswell, Co Limerick. He was the youngest child of a landowner father who had already raised a grown family of seven, some by then married, by his first wife. Thomas would be the only surviving child of his father's second marriage. His father, who was also a talented painter, died when Westropp was six years old. His mother, an important influence, always carried a sketchbook, and her interest was antiquities. Later he recalled the day his mother brought him to Attyflin rath. Ashe FitzGerald mentions the eight-year-old Westropp drawing Ennis Abbey. By the time he was 15 he had documented Kilpeacon Church, where his father and the Westropp ancestors were buried and where he too would be laid to rest.
Ashe FitzGerald evokes a sense of the world and the lively people who encouraged the young Westropp. She is especially good on his excursion to the Aran Islands in 1878 and the architectural drawings he executed there. Having secured an MA at Trinity College Dublin, he went on to take a degree in civil engineering. Yet even as a student, he had already developed what would be the lifelong habit of consulting the documentary resources of the Public Records Office and the Four Courts and the muniments of Dublin Castle. One of his earliest projects was researching the Westropp family, which had arrived in Ireland following the Cromwellian wars.
Apprenticed to Bindon Stoney, chief engineer of Dublin Port and later a member of the Royal Irish Academy, Westropp must have witnessed some of the major Dublin bridge-building projects as well as the construction of the port. Westropp also served as assistant surveyor for Co Meath and worked on the Nanny and Clady river drainage project. However, by 1888, at the age of only 28, he could afford to abandon engineering and concentrate on recording antiquities. He served Ireland, and particularly Co Clare, very well.
Ashe FitzGerald notes Westropp's commitment to "the principle of scientific excavation" and his horror at the activities of the group known as the British Israelites at Tara, the site they wrongly believed to hold the missing Ark of the Covenant. Westropp's views on the ongoing threat to Tara would be edifying. More than a century after his death, his subtle vision endures. As spring reasserts itself, now is the time to enjoy the Burren, and Thomas Johnson Westropp is an inspiring, informed and engaging mentor.
Archaeology of the Burren, by TJ Westropp, is reissued by Clasp Press, 15