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Growing up in Sussex, I took for granted a countryside physically rich in the layering of the past: real Tudor beams, clay tiles, flint walls, dew ponds, field paths and stiles. In Ireland so much of what ought to have been history has been disowned: in long stretches of landscape the centuries have passed without leaving any vernacular mark. So little yet exists to connect people with their landscape, to make it ,,part of what they are.
The big new roads do not help. They whisk us along at a remove from local lives, front gates and gardens, and the intimate business of the land. They overlay the countryside with a quite new matrix of time and space, a different sense of what matters. The lives they pass by seem pensioned off to insignificance in quadrants of anonymous fields, redundant webs of lanes. There was meaning in the old, narrow roads, a sense of being part of humanity's spread across the landscape, of being on the way from here to there. The world's new ambition is to be everywhere at once
Extract from "A years turning", Viney M.
Blackstaff 1996
www.sensibletransport.com
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