This week (August 20th – 28th) marks National Heritage Week in Ireland. It is a multifaceted event coordinated by The Heritage Council that aims to aid awareness and education about our heritage, and thereby encouraging its conservation and preservation. As part of Heritage Week 2016 there will be daily posts to the Disused School Houses Blog for the duration of the event to promote awareness of our built and cultural heritage. Below is the first in the Heritage Week 2016 Blog Post series.
Just a few weeks ago I added a post to the blog which provided a little background into why there are so many abandoned national schools scattered across the rural Irish landscape. In short, it’s a story of changing demographics, emigration, depopulation of the rural countryside, and the changing requirements of rural settlement. However, to begin this series, I thought I’d write a little something about what I find inside these abandoned buildings.
As the title of this post suggests, I’m not just interested in the buildings, their architecture,and the fittings, furniture and debris that are strewn across these echoing spaces, but also in the stories they tell, their setting, and the nostalgia and memory that make up these cognitive landscapes. They have great significance as relics of disappearing rural Irish lifeways as the landscape around these school houses has changed significantly over the past 50 -100 years. However, school desks, blackboards and fireplaces are easier to photograph than memories.
Visiting Reyrawer National School in the Slieve Aughty Hills last Autumn was a perfect example of a disappearing landscape. The autumnal evening sun hung low in the sky, and the few clouds that had lingered as twilight beckoned were tainted red and orange around their fringes by the setting sun. Beside me on the low hillside, and hidden in the dense forestry plantation of the Slieve Aughtys, was the now-disused, one-roomed Reyrawer National School; dilapidated and empty, haunting and isolated.The now forested hill-sides were dotted with the ruins of former farmsteads. The former pasture and rough grazing lands had been sown with coniferous plantations, and the ubiquitous and imposing wind-turbines highlighted the movement away from agrarian living in this area, as an alternative and profitable use is sought for this now people-less landscape. In the Aughtys, the result is an empty space, a desolate place where few people live.
