ABSTRACT
A diverse, energetic cultural arena included the National Trust, the broadcast and print media – especially the Belfast Telegraph – and, crucially, E. Estyn Evans, Professor of Geography at Queen’s University and a leading member of the academy. As an authority on Ulster geography, Evans authored his first major work, Irish Heritage (1942), which, despite the title, focused on Ulster and its apparent topographical affinity with Britain – ‘The links with Britain are strongest and oldest, alike in geology and history . . . from Carlingford round to Swilly’. He roundly rejected the ‘Celtic twilight . . . a Golden Age to which they [nationalists] would have us return. Our view should be forward’ (Evans, 1942: 16, 18). Politicising landscape in the service of Unionism was not unprecedented, but Evans sought to create a site wherein a common cultural identity for both the Protestant and Catholic communities could be developed. He found it in the shared agrarian culture of the Ulster countryside: ‘the rural tradition is of special
importance to the maintenance of society’ (ibid.: 2-3, 54-55). Evans generalised easily on the ‘undoubted virtues of the Ulster character’ and his work constituted, effectively, a foundation-myth for a distinctive phase in northern history, one in which he emerged as a major public commentator. Other leading contributors included the poet W. R. Rodgers and Hugh Shearman, author and regime publicist. In their work, age-old alienation between north and south and a blending of native and settler characters in Ulster found expression (Rodgers, n.d. [1947]; Shearman, 1950: 6, 11-12). Reflecting this mindset, the Stormont MP, Brian Maginess, claimed:
there was always something in the free soil of Ulster that bred a free race of men who would neither accept dictation from Strongbow in Wexford or de Valera in Dublin. The people . . . in every section and every religion [my italics] are gradually coming to glory in the name of Ulster, and in the name of Ulstermen . . . and in the heritage which we are creating at the present time.
