A Sense of Place, A Place of Senses: Land and a Landscape in the West of Ireland

Abstract

One of the analytic points made about “contested spaces” is that they can bring to the fore the tacit cultural understandings and unexamined ideological frameworks which, precisely by virtue of their being tacit and unexamined, are integral to the routine flow of everyday life. This paper amplifies the proposition ethnographically by selectively examining an extended conflict over the Irish state’s intention to build an interpretive center at Mullaghmore, a mountain in the west of Ireland. It is argued that at one level local people were at odds over whether the mountain was land or a landscape, whilst at another level they were divided over appropriate ways of living in this peripheral setting in the final decade of the twentieth century. It was only in the process of contesting Mullaghmore as space, however, that these cultural differences and ideological divisions became explicit and open to public critique.