In 1812 lookouts in the hills above the Township of Urris collapsed the path through the Mamore Gap, blocking it off to revenue collectors and founding what would later become known as the Poitín Republic. After increasing taxes on whiskey to fund its wars abroad, the British occupation turned to squeeze poitín distillers, levying fines that displaced whole communities as a form of collective punishment. When the people of Urris blocked the road up by St Eigne’s Well they mounted a resistance that would hold off attackers for three years and let the local distilling industry thrive.
In 2023 Connor Dougan aka Deathbed Convert visited St Eigne’s Well – an ancient pilgrimage site at the top of the kind of steep, winding hillside road that could burn out your nerves before your clutch – and ten other spots around the edges of Inishowen, where he composed and played electronic music through a speaker and recorded the result on top of the sounds of place and passers-through. I’ve found the result has got deep under my skin. If you spend hours a day walking back and forth across Belfast trying not to slip on wet leaves and further injure your already dicky ankle, finding a way for your head to be in Donegal is pretty compelling.
The effect of recording these tracks openly in the locations they are composed for is that, instead of environmental sounds creeping in around the edges, the music feels as though it is built upon a precise geographical layer. The melodies tend not to stray too far, staying pinned to a place while textures move across them like the dozen shifting types of light you can find in the Dunaff sky at any one time. That wee eye buried in your brain moves from crannies to vistas and needs the odd wipe from the spray.
Inishowen is a perfect location for a project like this one. Every place on Earth collects layers of story and history, truths and myths, present pasts and past futures, but up there, right at the top of the island of Ireland, those layers can feel particularly exposed. The force of the elements doesn’t let much remain hidden.
St Eigne’s Well Gap of Mamore
Famine walls vein across hillsides. You can see them from Tullagh Bay, where this album opens, and up around another recording site at Lenan Head. These dry stone walls were built exactly where they would never be needed, by people on the verge of starvation, purely because those with food to spare could not envisage a world where they could hand bread over to people who hadn’t laboured for it.
Looking across from Mamore Gap to Dunaff Head you can see the cottage where Roger Casement lived while learning Irish and organising volunteers, or the headland where Wolfe Tone was captured by the Royal Navy. The oldest known neolithic campsite in Ireland was unearthed from beneath the same soil.
If you took a boat from the Carrickabraghy side of Isle of Doagh to Five Finger Strand, where the road leads up to Malin Head – the site of a standout track on this record – you would pass over the outline of a sunken boat in the sand, before possibly joining it down there. My granda spent every summer of his childhood nipping across that same stretch in a dinghy on waters that still claim lives, from one beach of sinking sand to another. The only boat I’ve seen brave that stretch since I’ve been visiting is the stationary one advertising the Doagh Famine Village with a row of costumed mannequins I’m not convinced aren’t supposed to be the Village People. There is something about the strange shifting of the sands and waters there that carries voices across the bay and makes them sound like whispers at your shoulder.
Malin Head
Landscape in these parts can rise up suddenly above you or quickly drop away. Walled spaces either still hold together with determined but finite will, or have finally given in to whatever wilder magic came before them. The fact that four of these tracks are recorded at forts or castles says something about the relationship between the forces who have tried to tame this place and the elements that tore those forces apart or wore them down.
Lenan Head Fort overlooks the bay where local fishermen were once lifted from the waters and drafted into combat in the Napoleonic Wars. Fort Dunree was built during the same conflict but remained militarised right through both World Wars. Carrickabraghy Castle has seen Viking raids and overlooked the site of a battle.
These vestiges of Empire stick out against the landscape so vividly partly because they jar as artificial structures in a place where nature remains mostly untamed, but also because they were built to withstand attack. Personally, I enjoy them as reminders that all colonial presents will eventually become colonial pasts.
St Columbas Straid
It wouldn’t be right of me to suggest that this album is infused with any sense, one way or another, that it is concerned with the area’s social or political history. In a large part, I’m bringing that to it as I’m listening, but it is also there in the layers of the place. Most of it not even buried yet. Anyway, this is a project that invites conversation. It comes through in the background from radio shows, local dogs having their say and even a passing American voice that stops for a chat about the recording process and church music. The core act of playing the music out into the open air suggests a kind of generosity, making the project approachable on terms that aren’t explicitly its own.
Whether Dougan had any of the area’s radical, imperial or ancient history in mind when he recorded these tracks doesn’t really matter. Those events and the narratives that follow them aren’t really the voice of the place anyway, just echoes of it, reactions to it. Inverse Field does a better job of capturing whatever that voice might be than something that merely cycled through its timeline. It is its own event. Its own echo and reaction. Inishowen played back to itself. Paul Doran
Shroove Lighthouse
Photos by Connor Dougan
