Innocent Landscapes, Resumed Search, Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown, June 2010
Last weekend as I ambled long the lane that leads up to the site I met the cadaver dogs. They were a motley crew of various breeds but appeared, like most dogs, to be pretty cheerful in spite of their onerous duties. Again as often on this project it was a brief chance encounter where little is said between the human mongrels out sniffing this landscape. As they run out of fields to excavate both searched and unsearched from the first attempts in 1999 and 2000 the attention has now shifted to the untouched wood that lies north, further down the lane. I had discovered this recently when struggling on one of those terrible blue-sky days which usually forces me to go seeking shelter from such awful light in a wooded glade. Wandering down the grassy track that ran by this woodland revealed a number of the blue bamboo stick with grid annotation that have become familiar to me. These markers of an area to be explored were dotted here and there along the pathway and being ever so slightly curious I decided to see if these extended in a line across the woods, which they did and presumably in a straight line as due to the dense growth here and there it was very difficult at times to follow this invisible line. At times I would end up back where I started or at least where I think I started which reminded me of those lovely Beckett lines from Molloy which soon put me straight again.
“and having heard that when a man in a forest thinks he is going in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble. And my head was a storehouse of useful knowledge. And if I did not go rigorously in a straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something”
Innocent Landscapes, Resumed Search, Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown, June 2010
One of the aspects that have emerged from looking at this landscape on and off over ten years is an exploration of the linear timeline of narrative and history. When I was first given directions to this place I remember scrawling down Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown on a blue folder that was near to hand but in assembling the book narrative the pre-name got dropped off to match the idea of all the locations being small largely unknown singly named townlands, known only to locals with local knowledge of each field and ditch. So this place became Wilkinstown, which actually doesn’t exist as a town with a gathering of houses and even a mini main street. In many ways all the locations in Innocent Landscapes are very real but could also be in a certain way of the imagination like the Bailegangaire of Tom Murphy or the Craggy Island of Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan.
When I first arrived at Wilkinstown back in 1999 the area being examined was no longer a wood as the first requirement of the police search team based on the information they had was to forge a clearing through an established woodland. In many ways I was suffering a side effect in my employment of late photography as explored and at times rightly criticized by David Campany in his essay in the Photoworks collection Where is the Photograph. So in many ways Coghalstown Wood didn’t exist as the potent locus of activity and the site here at Wilkinstown became two fields bounded, particularly on the Northern side, by a wooded area and yet now, as the search may reach into this residual woodland that was not deemed as site, it suddenly has become very real. In a strange way, theoretically at least, I am photographing this anonymous unsigned place before it became, if even in a small way, identified and named. An elliptical rather than conventional crow flying timeline of history has folded back on itself at this location. You could say that my patient visiting most weekends has been rewarded with a form of early photography – an opportunity to photograph before the human intervention leaves it’s trace, which of course, I will not resist.
Innocent Landscapes, Resumed Search, Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown, May 2010
And so at this point, a year on from this resumed search, it must feel for all involved somewhat like a phrase I heard on the radio recently ‘… like banging your head against a vicious circle’. But on it will go this hopeful walk in a hopefully straight line.
Innocent Landscapes, Resumed Search, Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown, June 2010