The late Professor Marshall McLuhan presciently noted, long before the advent of the World Wide Web, that we “live today in an age of information and communication [in which] electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all men participate.” The contents of entire libraries now reside online, making history accessible from any place, at any time, without the need for even local travel. Even so, there has been a renewed interest in recent years, across many disciplines, in the concept of place. Place, as noted by J. Nicholas Entriken, “presents itself to us as a condition of the human experience” such that “our relations to place … become elements in the construction of our individual and collective identities.”
The first stop for travelers on the recent Hibernian History Tour of Ireland, fresh from the Dublin airport, the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone in the ancient burial ground at Bodenstown, County Kildare, illustrates the significance of place in Irish history. Standing before the ruined church, dating to 1352, that forms the backdrop of Tone’s final resting place, the group contemplated Tone’s legacy as the father of Irish Republicanism and the significance of Bodenstown as a place of annual pilgrimage for generations of Irish patriots. Later that same day, our group stood atop Vinegar Hill in County Wexford and looked out from the base of the historic windmill, which stands, as it did in 1798, a silent, enduring witness to the sacrifices of the common people of Wexford who died, in the poignant words of Seamus Heaney, “shaking scythes at cannon.” The port town of Cobh in County Cork, from which so many of our ancestors embarked on their one-way journey from the land of their birth, proved as significant a place as any on the tour, as we reflected on the horrors of An Gorta Mór and the triumph of those who survived to make a new life in America. The group spent a relaxing two days in beautiful Kinsale, the site of the infamous siege and battle of 1601-1602 in which the Irish forces of O’Neill and O’Donnell could not break through to relieve their Spanish allies, with disastrous results for the old Gaelic Order. Traveling west through County Cork, a roadside stop at the Michael Collins ambush site near Béal na Bláth allowed the group to contemplate the relationship and intertwined legacies of Collins and his erstwhile comrade, Éamon de Valera, at the place where Collins received his mortal wound. The famous Ring of Kerry provided beautiful scenery en route to Derrynane House, the home of Daniel O’Connell, where our travelers took in the beauty of the place while contemplating O’Connell’s great triumph of 1829, Catholic Emancipation, his failed effort to repeal the Act of Union, and his place in the pantheon of Irish heroes. The group stopped at the majestic Rock of Cashel, seat of the Kings of Munster for 500 years, before traveling deep into the past in the Boyne Valley, where the ingenious Stone Age builders of the Newgrange complex showed a strong understanding of the significance of place. Later that day, before travelling on to Dublin, members of the group stood on the Hill of Tara, like the legendary High Kings of Ireland before them, and placed their hands on the Lia Fáil, or Stone of Destiny. The penultimate stop on the tour was the GPO, where our travelers took in the battle scars still extant on the magnificent Greek Revival portico and reflected on the events of Easter Week, 1916, and the tumultuous years that followed. The tour concluded, appropriately, at Glasnevin Cemetery, where we descended into the tomb of O’Connell and stopped to reflect at the final resting places of Parnell, de Valera and Collins, among many others. History is truly at our fingertips in this remarkable age of technology, but there is something special about being in the places that have shaped and informed the Irish identity.