ABSTRACT
The recent popular remembering of a tragedy which occurred on 30 and 31 March 1849 challenges the perception that the Irish Famine ended in the 1840s. This chapter uses the Doolough tragedy as a point of departure for exploring the trans-historical power of suffering and how it comes to be inscribed in landscape. It considers the Erris region of north-west area Mayo as a case-study in nineteenth-century thinking about place. The Doolough commemoration typically advocates a leftist-dissident stance in opposition to neo-liberal economic models, and the theme of the 2007 event was Voices in the Wilderness: Erris, Gas, and Global Warming'. As actors resistant to the path of colonial civilization, native populations embedded in peripheral, mountainous, boggy, or otherwise undeveloped terrain, also stood for an ecosystem that was perceived as savage. The chapter argues that the landscape aesthetics of the nineteenth century, with their colonial logics of development, tied the idea of wilderness to the idea of a wild people.
