Conclusion – Atlantic Isles

Atlantic Isles has examined the cultural and political prominence of the west in modern British and Irish history, which flourished in the final decades of the nineteenth century. It is not the intention of this book to suggest that the national context is less important, or that perceptions of continuity across the west flattened national distinctiveness – there is a wealth of scholarship which demonstrates that distinctive national identities were increasingly assertive in this period. However, this book does suggest that there are new connections to be found, which can only be fully understood by looking across national boundaries and by taking a transnational approach to the western landscapes of Britain and Ireland.

One such connection was infrastructural, and the first chapter sketched the series of uneven developments in the transport network that made previously remote places more accessible. The multiplying and thickening network of railway lines and coach services connected Paddington station with Cornish coastal sites such as Land’s End, the Lizard Peninsula and Tintagel, and Thomas Telford’s road to Holyhead marked the expansion of the infrastructure state through north Wales. As the nineteenth century progressed, Telford’s road was followed by railway lines that made that region of the west easily accessible from the large towns and cities of midland and north-west England. In 1895, the Midland Great Western Railway lines that linked Dublin with Galway and Westport were extended to Clifden and Achill, and between 1897 and 1901 the railway approached Skye as it reached Kyle of Lochalsh and Mallaig, offering a swifter route to the misty isle for those not travelling the whole way on a steamer from MacBrayne’s growing fleet. At the same time, an attendant tourism industry became increasingly sophisticated, and the work of publishers, railway and steamboat companies, tourist boards, resort authorities, writers, artists and publicity departments made once remote western landscapes more familiar to readers and travellers alike. It was not just tourists who travelled westwards, and new connections by road, rail and water were traversed by a multitude of artists, writers, MPs, geologists, historians, islanders, soldiers, police, journalists, self-appointed social investigators and others, many of whom wrote about their experiences and are explored in this book.

These infrastructural and cultural transformations highlighted the ways in which western landscapes differed from the urban-industrial centres of Britain and Ireland at the same moment they became more tightly integrated into the territory of the United Kingdom. As Chapter 2 argued, physical and imaginative accessibility produced a distinctive ‘westward gaze’, which was articulated by those who looked and travelled to the west. The westward gaze typically began from afar, in cities such as Edinburgh or in London railway stations, and the journey westwards described the departure from anglicised areas of the British-Irish Isles. Along the way, border regions such as the Welsh Marches and thresholds in the landscape such as the River Tamar were places where anticipation and excitement grew. Leaving Galway city and entering Connemara or catching a first glimpse of the Cuillin mountains prompted evocative descriptions of the landscape, and as the western edge of the land came closer, the language of travel writing was full of mystery, magic, enchantment and descriptions of delicate and otherworldly conditions such as mist, haze, sunset and darkness. Looking out from mountains and cliff edges over the sea to the western horizon, this was a gaze into the imaginative and the unknown, unlike the imperial associations of the sea more familiar to British historians.

Chapters 2 and 3 also argued that gazing westwards across the sea led to more focused but equally imaginative engagements with stories about elusive islands and sunken lands. The broader argument here is that the west was a site of modern enchantment, where the rational and sceptical mind of the geologist and archaeologist was no agent of Weberian disenchantment. Far from demystifying western landscapes and seascapes and dispelling wonder, self-proclaimed scientific researchers re-enchanted traditional folk stories and myths about Tír na nÓg, Hy Brasil, Cantre’r Gwaelod and Lyonesse by suggesting that they might be based on a foundation of fact. Furthermore, these chapters demonstrated how stories about sunken lands re-emerged with new salience amid early twentieth-century anxieties about coastal erosion and rising sea levels. In the west, doubt, uncertainty and wonder underpinned a thoroughly modern enchantment, which offered a spiritual antidote to the disenchanting effects of modernity.

The traveller’s search for spiritual renewal and enchantment was part of a broader range of behaviours that, as Chapter 4 explored, shed light on how the west was a set of places for self-fashioning, where individual identities were performed and inscribed in space. The search for authenticity was at the heart of many of these performances, though it was easier to step away from the beaten track and leave the tourist crowds behind in the mountains of Connemara and Skye, or beyond the railway on the Llŷn Peninsula and the Scilly Isles. Moving through the landscape – whether on foot, by rail, in horse-drawn coaches or in motorcars and motorbuses – offered opportunities for travel writers to distinguish themselves from the crowd, and the historical imagination triggered insights amid the cromlechs of western Cornwall and at Dún Aonghasa and Conwy Castle, which also helped knowledgeable travellers differentiate between themselves and clueless tourists. The upland, mountainous and ragged cliffscapes of the west provided a series of arduous tests for those wishing to display a certain brand of masculinity, but this chapter also demonstrated that the persona of the adventurer-traveller, who faced danger and experienced misadventure, was also adopted by many women. Aside from challenging landscapes and sites of historical significance, interacting with a ‘colourful cast’ of hosts injected travel writing with humour, and travellers displayed their ability to draw out wisdom from old men in conversation, while directing a male gaze towards voiceless young women.

But, as Chapter 5 argued, the westward gaze and its associated performances were also directed back towards home. Introspection accompanied outward journeys, and the renewal that could be achieved in the west grew more urgent in light of the rapid, destabilising, and often bewildering transformations associated with industrial, urban and commercial modernity. In western Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, however, remoteness from industry signified economic deficiency, which revealed a lingering colonial discourse that equated English settlement and capitalist production with progress. In contrast, the Welsh quarrying industry and the infrastructure of water were promoted using the imagery of mountainous landscapes in a region where the rural was unmistakeably modern. Modernity, as Marshall Berman reminds us, was full of paradox and contradiction, and the remoteness of the west also became the answer to the moral and physical degeneration caused by urban slums, while the spread of suburban architecture gave new meaning to crofters’ huts, cottages in Cornish fishing villages, and the whitewashed walls and thatched roofs dotting the rural landscape of western Ireland.

The anxieties that accompanied urban-industrial and commercial modernity claimed that the physical and moral health of the nation was deteriorating, which highlighted the importance of the west as a potential source of regeneration for the future. However, western landscapes also explained the deeply historical emergence of the United Kingdom. As Chapter 6 demonstrated, this began with the geological imagination, which inspired dramatic passages of writing that described the titanic forces that had produced valleys and mountains in the northern and western upland areas of these isles. Geology provided a stratigraphical principle that also had pervasive metaphorical power and informed a layered understanding of historical development. To travel westwards was to walk back in time and tread on the ancient ground that provided the foundation for the modern United Kingdom. The language of geology also shaped contemporary understandings of racial ‘strata’ and ‘bedrock’ races in the west. The Iberian and Celtic layers, having swept westward across Europe, had also left their mark on the modern nation, as ethnologists and travel writers measured skulls and commented on dark features that indicated the ‘great human drift’.

The west, then, could be understood as different in degree rather than in kind, and the political implications of this notion came to the fore during the Home Rule debates. Chapter 7 traced the multinational variety of Britishness that emerged from an understanding of the geological, racial and linguistic differences of the west. These differences could be celebrated as part of a valuable contribution to ‘British’ national character, and teleological stories of war, resistance and struggle followed by mutually beneficial political union were grounded in western locations. In Cornwall, Scotland and Wales, bravery and loyalty were appropriated by the British nation as productive forces for the military and in the Empire. In Ireland, conflict was not confined to the past, and the story of the union inevitably slipped into unresolved political issues that, it was hoped, might soon be settled.

Looking across national borders need not be an approach that remains confined to the Atlantic Isles as defined in this book. Brittany, too, experienced the expansion of the French state when railway lines extended to Quimper (1863), Brest (1865) and Landerneau (1867), and branch lines to Audierne and Pont-l’Abbé brought travellers to the far west.¹ Local roads were repaired and rebuilt, providing important links between rural towns and railway stations.² Cook’s Handbook for Normandy and Brittany (1883) claimed its publication was ‘a public necessity’ given the new accessibility of the west, and that all the principal towns were within the reach of the lines constructed by the West of France Railway Company.³ Further extensions followed to Concarneau (1883), Douarnenez (1884), Guilvinec and Saint-Guénolé via Pont-l’Abbé (1907), connecting Brittany’s fishing and canning centres with urban markets, and also bringing tourists westwards.⁴ Even Penmarch and Pointe du Raz, on the far western coastline, were more conveniently accessible, and the guidebooks anticipated that ‘every year will bring large additions to the number of English visitors’.⁵

The transport network is not the only point of comparison, and the westward gaze also shaped travel writing in Brittany. In 1906, Nancy Bell approached the Breton peninsula from Normandy, and this journey was marked by the geological transition from ‘gleaming chalk cliffs’ to the ‘storm-worn granitic rocks’ that had been ‘tortured into a thousand fantastic shapes’ by the wild Atlantic waves.⁶ Beyond Kergonet, near the Breton town of Lorient, Francis Miltoun claimed that the traveller ‘leaves pretty much all France behind him’, and Breton-speaking Finistère seemed like a landscape ‘Welsh and Cornish mixed’ to the poet Matilda Betham-Edwards.⁷ Questions about modernity emerged at this Atlantic coastline, too, where the travel writer L. Edna Walter felt that ‘tradition’ and ‘mystery’ became more significant than ‘progress’ and ‘proven fact’.⁸ Bell explained that the ‘all-potent element of mystery’ was heightened by the ‘varying effects’ of humidity, ocean spray, and the soil, and the rocky headland of the Pointe du Raz, which crumbles into the sea like Land’s End, became ‘even more entrancingly beautiful’ when darkness began to fall and the final tourists left.⁹ The gaze did not end with the land, of course, and out to sea travellers turned their minds towards Kêr Is, King Gradlon’s once-spectacular city which reputedly rests under the waves of the Baie de Douarnenez.¹⁰ As stated in the introduction to this book, there is much more research to be done on western places and the connections between them.

The western landscapes of Britain and Ireland have retained their allure for travellers and writers today. In Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986), Tim Robinson described looking up at Dún Aonghasa from a ledge below the cliffs, in a passage that demonstrates the ever-present power of western landscapes to inspire wonder:

For the cliffs treble in height as they encircle the farther arc of the bay, and the dramatic change of scale projects one’s gaze into legendary perspectives. If the setting sun is riding into the bay on the backs of the waves, illuminating the vastness of the opposing precipice in golden detail, while the solemn recession of promontories beyond goes back step by step into rose-petal impalpability on the western horizon, then the setting is definitive: Dún Aonghasa, heavy with centuries, dreams upon a pinnacle of another world.¹¹

For Robinson, this was a world of Celtic myth, ‘a wide western province of the human mind’ opened by ‘primal elements such as light and darkness, the air, the depths of the earth and sea’.¹² Robert Macfarlane also found himself drawn to ‘the far north or far west’ when he went in search of The Wild Places (2007) marked by wooded islands in Scotland and Ireland, hill forts and tumuli in Wales and south-western England, Hebridean cliffs, and remote refuges of eagles, otters, and snow hares.¹³ More recently, David Gange went by kayak to find the real west, his Frayed Atlantic Edge (2019), away from ‘the mists of Celtic twilight’. Instead, he hoped to find a place where ‘the rich worlds of real human beings exceeded … the hazy types of myth’.¹⁴ In the end, Gange’s romanticism and his sense of enchantment remained intact, strengthened by ‘a story, an emotion or a physical sensation’ that he could connect to ‘every western indentation’ on the map.¹⁵

However, while ‘the pull of magnetic west’ described by Robinson, Macfarlane and Gange is in keeping with many of the writers discussed in this book, significant changes have also taken place since the early twentieth century.¹⁶ The establishment of the Irish Free State (1922) severed the political unity of these isles and removed the west of Ireland as a potential site for the foundation of a pan-insular identity. Despite this, tourism remained a ‘model of cooperative success and a source of dialogue’ after partition, and travel literature also crossed the new border.¹⁷ When H. V. Morton went In Search of Ireland (1930), he included both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in his narrative, and Stephen Gwynn did the same when writing Ireland in Ten Days (1935).¹⁸ Likewise, Findlay Muirhead’s Blue Guides: Great Britain (1930) was restricted to ‘England, Wales, and Scotland’, leaving Northern Ireland for inclusion alongside the Free State in the Blue Guides: Ireland (1932).¹⁹ Soon after the political border was established Stephen Gwynn insisted that Ireland remained ‘virtually grouped into Eastern and Western’, because ‘any eastern county is more like to any other eastern county than to any western’.²⁰ The Irish Free State was, Morton made clear, ‘a foreign country’, and after crossing into the North he ‘seemed to be in England again’, but he also suggested that the border – far from representing a clear distinction between altogether different peoples – ‘has all the elements of the game’, in which those on either side ‘play at being foreigners’.²¹ Nevertheless, the new political reality meant that the west of Ireland could no longer be connected to the idea of a deeply historical United Kingdom.

Discussions about the racial foundations of national identity also began to change in the interwar period. It is true that, despite the rise of Mendelian genetics, physical anthropology and racial typology enjoyed what Paul Rich called a ‘long Victorian sunset’, and remained influential into the 1930s.²² As late as 1939, H. J. Fleure was still writing about the ‘dark deep-set eyes’ and ‘large cheek-bones’ that suggested an Iberian ‘substratum’ in the people of Wales.²³ However, Fleure and many of his contemporaries were increasingly alarmed at the real-world application of race theory in Nazi Germany, where eugenics was built into the regime’s ‘race fitness’ programme. In an article called ‘The Celtic West’ (1940), Fleure accused British political leaders of ‘helping Nazi racialist propaganda’ through their misuse and misunderstanding of the term ‘race’.²⁴ A few years earlier, in an article for Eugenics Review on the subject of the ‘Nordic myth’, Fleure emphasised that ‘race-type is an abstraction, to be used with much reserve’, and he was alarmed at the way in which ‘the apostles of the Nordic Race’ used race theory to ‘glorify some group or other’ and support their ‘political ambition’ and ‘mania for power’, whether it be the descendants of ‘the men of the Mayflower’, the English landed aristocracy or ‘the masters of Germany’.²⁵ In this context, the language of race was increasingly questioned, and Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon opted instead for the term ‘ethnic group’ in their book We Europeans (1935), which anticipated broader changes in the terminology of the social sciences after 1945.²⁶ Discussions of ‘national character’ also seemed too rooted in the Victorian period to be relevant after the Second World War, and the BBC scrapped plans for a radio programme on the topic in 1950.²⁷

In place of nation, the politics of class came to the fore in the interwar period, when the Labour Party formed its first governments in Britain, and after 1945 the British imperial nation became reframed in narrower terms, built instead on the welfare state, national industries and the memory of the Second World War, which became, to use Paul Gilroy’s phrase, Britain’s ‘mythic moment of national becoming’.²⁸ Following the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism from the 1960s and the process of devolution from the 1990s, the SNP and Plaid Cymru have increasingly adopted civic as opposed to ethnic formulations of nationalism in recent years. After forming in 1925, Plaid Cymru unveiled the triban as its symbol in 1933 – three intersecting green triangles representing the mountains and demonstrating how Welsh political nationalism was grounded in the landscape. In 2006, the party replaced the triban with the yellow Welsh poppy, and dropped ‘Cymru’ from their branding, removing Welsh landscapes and language in an attempt to widen their appeal to voters.²⁹ Civic understandings of Irishness have also grown in the Republic of Ireland and more recently in Northern Ireland, where since the Good Friday Agreement Sinn Féin has increasingly rejected ethnic and sectarian definitions of the nation.³⁰

But, for a time, the making of these isles was a process understood to have much deeper historical roots, which could be explored by looking westwards. For a period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of the west was particularly influential in Britain and Ireland, in politics as well as in culture, and this is something that can only be understood by looking across conventional, national boundaries and embracing the complexities of Irish-British connections. This approach leads to new insights in modern British and Irish history, revealing that the west was a particularly powerful place of modern enchantment, that Britishness has existed in varieties that are broader and deeper than historians have recognised, and that these isles have been, and continue to be, Atlantic Isles.