Reconstructing ‘Nature’ as a Picturesque theme park: The colonial case of Ireland.

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This article explores how a form of visuality—the picturesque—became the essential framework for the emergence of theme parks on the landed estates of Anglo-Irish landlords during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially, the cultural forms of the picturesque evolved from the disciplines of landscape painting and the philosophy of aesthetics. These forms later became the design principles guiding the English Informal style of gardening. As a result, the original abstract concepts of the picturesque became physically embedded in the Irish landscape ecosystems, establishing these spatial enclaves as a picturesque theme park.

In becoming spatialized, the colonial ideology of the picturesque—designing the Irish landscape to resemble the English landscape—became a colonized space that was inherently hegemonic with regard to the native sense of place. By physically embedding the picturesque visual principles into the local ecosystems, the cultural forms of the picturesque took on ecological dimensions. Here, aesthetic forms of society merged with the natural forms of plants and their metabolic systems.

And in ‘naturalizing’ the aesthetic principles of the picturesque, any portrayal of a scene from the theme park tended to replicate the hegemonic position of the picturesque as the dominant place ideology. Since the portrayal tended to reproduce what the writer or artist actually saw, the problem was that the scenes were already changed and manipulated to reflect the picturesque visuality. This picturesque visuality fell from its dominant position with the decline of Irish landlordism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The capacity for seeing (nature) with the painters’ eye was the Picturesque vision.

(Richard Payne Knight)

Where power was, there beauty shall reside.

(Ann Bermingham)

No natural laws can be done away with. What can change is the form in which these laws operate.

(Karl Marx)

For the house of the planter is known by the trees.

(Austin Clarke)

Introduction: A brief history of the complex cultural forms of the picturesque

This article explores how a new form of visuality—the Picturesque—became the dominant framework through which the Irish landscape was interpreted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially consisting of painterly concepts that emerged from Italian landscape painting in the seventeenth century, the picturesque was theoretically developed in the eighteenth-century philosophy of aesthetics. These cultural forms of the picturesque subsequently became an interpretative mechanism through which landscape connoisseurship emerged as an elite cultural activity among Ireland’s landed gentry. Later, these ideological forms of the picturesque became the accepted principles that guided the design dicta of the English informal style of gardening in rural Ireland.

In becoming a gardening design framework, the cultural and ideological forms of the picturesque took on a material structure as these abstract concepts became embedded into the natural structures of the local landscape ecosystems. It is at this point that the gardeners of the informal English style responded to the cultural forms of the picturesque, and crucially where the cultural forms of this ideological circulation process of the picturesque entered into a material production process resulting in the picturesque landscape becoming a theme park. A theme park that not only reflected the contradictory cultural forms of the picturesque but also took on a spatial dimension where the design principles of the English informal garden attempted to transform the material structures of the Irish landscape by creating ‘little Englands’ in Ireland. These spatial enclaves on the landlord’s demesne, protected behind high walls, became a colonised space where the hegemonic picturesque held sway over the native sense of place.

This theme park and its cultural forms of the picturesque closed down when the legal buttress of landlordism fell in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We begin our analysis with a travelogue account of Ireland in the early 1840s.

A ‘picturesque’ travelogue to nineteenth-century Ireland

Travelogue writing on Ireland had its formative period from 1775 to 1850. The greatest travel writers of this period were Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Carter Hall. They undertook several tours of Ireland in the early 1840s, from which they compiled a travelogue published in several editions. Their stated purpose was to induce visits to Ireland, especially from mainland Britain:

“Those who require relaxation from labour, or may be advised to seek health under the influence of a mild climate, or search for sources of novel and rational amusement, or draw from a change of scene a stimulus to wholesome excitement, or covet acquaintance with the charms of nature, or wish to study a people full of original character—cannot project an excursion to any part of Europe that will afford a more ample recompense.”

In this opening statement, the Halls ideologically constructed Ireland as a place of escape, where one can depart from the routines of British everyday life and engage with exotic peoples living in a natural environment. What is strange about this construct is that it could be applied to Ireland at this particular period since the reality for the majority of Irish people was suffering from crushing poverty with no hope of escape. Therefore, the Halls seem to be evading the economic reality of mass poverty by encouraging their travelogue readers to see Ireland as a landscape picture:

“Wicklow is the garden of Ireland; its prominent feature is, indeed, sublimity—wild grandeur, healthful and refreshing; but among its high and bleak mountains there are numerous rich and fertile valleys, luxuriantly wooded and with the most romantic rivers running through them, forming in their course, an endless variety of cataracts. Its natural graces are enhanced in value, because they are invariably encountered after the eye and mind have been wearied from gazing upon the rude and uncultivated districts, covered with peat, upon the scanty herbage of which the small sheep can scarcely find pasture… Usually, the work of nature has been improved by the skill of Art, and it is impossible to imagine a scene more sublime and beautiful than the one of these ravines, of which there are so many.”

In this description, the pictorial quality of Wicklow’s landscape is structured on the syntax of the sentences. The Halls’ way of proceeding is to follow the description of the ‘high and bleak mountains’ with a description of the ‘rich and fertile valleys’. The syntax is sequenced around the word ‘after’, and this syntactical structure of the passage is not only imitating a viewing process but also a downward glance. The Halls have ‘placed’ their readers in the position of a commanding vantage point, allowing them to ‘see’ a wide sweep of the landscape. According to John Barrell, the main point in ‘constructing’ a textual viewing point is that it creates an imaginary space between the landscape and the spectator (reader), similar in effect to the real space between a picture and whoever is looking at it. This descriptive technique conveys the original sense of the picturesque—that which is capable of being represented in a picture.

However, on closer examination of the Halls’ text, another level in which their narrative celebrates the compositional techniques of the picturesque landscape painting of Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin can be identified. According to Ernst Gombrich, Lorraine and Poussin employed alternating bands of light and darkness to create depth in their paintings to establish a foreground, middle ground, and background to their compositions. Such Claudean compositional techniques can be identified in the Halls’ account of the Irish landscape in the following passage:

“Descending from any one of the hills, the moment the slope commences, the prospect becomes cheering beyond conception; all that wood, rock, and water—infinitely varied—can do to render a scene grand and beautiful, has been wrought in the valley over which the eye wanders; trees of every form and hue, from the lightest and the brightest green, to the sombre brown, or—made so by distance—the deepest purple; rivers, of every possible character, from the small thread of white that trickles down the hill-side, to the broad and deep current that rushes along, furiously, a mass of foam and spray.”

In identifying the differing colour tones of the trees and streams, the Halls locate the spatial characteristics associated with perspective similar to that achieved by the picturesque painters. However, not only do the Halls use the compositional spatial patterns employed by Claude and Poussin, but they also used the same aesthetic categories. These were categories of the beautiful and the sublime, and they formed themselves into a dualism. Following the publication of Edmund Burke’s “The Origin of our Ideas about the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757, the sublime and the beautiful became identified in the public mind as a pair of binary opposites. On one side of this dichotomy, the notion of the beautiful was held to consist of smooth flowing lines, smoothness of surface, and clear, bright colours. Stuart has even suggested that beneath the veil of Burke’s attempt at the analysis of beauty can be seen the gentle form of a woman’s body. The sublime was altogether an opposing quality that created an awe-inspiring and fearful feeling.

In the second passage from the Halls, the concept of the sublime was applied to the ‘rude and uncultivated districts, covered with peat’ of the ‘high and bleak mountains’, while the beautiful was located in the ‘rich and fertile valleys’ where ‘the work of nature has been improved by the skill of Art’. Accordingly, the spatial difference established by the aesthetic dichotomy was further complemented by the new dichotomy of art/nature. This particular dichotomy distinguishes natural wilderness from manmade cultivation. These dichotomies complement each other as they incorporate each other within similar spatial locations. The sublime and natural wilderness is applied to the ‘high and bleak mountains’, while the man-made landscape of the ‘fertile valleys’ is defined as beautiful. All of these techniques of description found within the Halls’ travelogue suggest their overall framework should be described as picturesque. These principles of composition borrowed from the painterly tradition of the picturesque created a new type of visuality, which moved from the medium of painting to that of travelogue writing and the philosophy of aesthetics.

This new visuality of the picturesque was not a passive activity; it was a process that involved reconstructing the landscape in the imagination according to the compositional principles of the picturesque. As a consequence of this mental process of composition, objects in the real landscape and their surface appearances were conceptually structured into new relationships with each other, determined by their visual characteristics within the overall framework of the picturesque. This mediated relationship of the picturesque and its compositional principles had to be learned, and were indeed learned so thoroughly that it became impossible for anyone with an aesthetic interest in landscape to look at the countryside without applying them, whether or not they knew they were doing so.

The Halls did not just provide a guide to Ireland’s picturesque locations; they also created a framework that helped the landscape connoisseur to evaluate the picturesque qualities within identified locations—as the following suggests: “The glen is little more than a mile in length; and midway a small moss-house has been erected; to our minds, the structure—although exceedingly simple—dist

urbed the perfect solitude of the place; where the work of the artificer ought not to be recognized.” The adequacy of the moss-house in the Halls’ text and in the specificity of its picturesque framework was determined not by its use-value, but by its surface appearance within the landscape of the glen. Its subsequent condemnation as an aesthetic object was conditioned by its social form; it was physically constructed, contrasting negatively with the natural forms of the glen. However, an important question emerges from the moss-house quotation: Who is the ‘artificer’ of the condemned moss-house?

‘Planting’ the cultural forms of the picturesque in Ireland

The picturesque artificer in the above quotation was the landlord. Due to the landlords’ ownership of the land, they were the only ones with the power and capital to physically reshape the landscape in a picturesque way. The perilous legal position of the Irish tenantry regarding land occupancy, and the smallness of their holdings, prevented them from redesigning the Irish landscape on the grand scale required by the picturesque. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, it was the Anglo-Irish landlords who began to redesign their demesnes according to the dictates of the picturesque. For this to happen, the abstract concept of the picturesque jumped from ideological texts into concrete reality in the form of the English informal style of landscape gardening.

According to Reeves-Smith, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the parkland of the demesnes occupied around 800,000 acres, or 4 percent of Ireland’s landmass, with over 7,000 houses featuring pleasure landscapes of ten acres or more. The English Informal or picturesque garden was itself a rejection of the rigid formality of the Dutch and French styles. The greatest exponent of this English style was Capability Brown. The Brownian landscape was worked in three elements alone: wood, water, and grass. The old formal gardens were ploughed over, avenues left to wander like country lanes; the vista from the window became one of gently rolling greenery, with cunningly placed clumps of trees in natural positions. Although engendering a spirit of simplicity, this picturesque garden created subtle changes to people’s relationship to their landscape. According to Stuart, Brown’s most famous contribution was to create a transition from a landscape seen in two dimensions to a landscape fully integrated in three dimensions: landscape as a sculpture, rather than as a painting. The Brownian landscape was a designed set to be walked through rather than a mere stationary view from the ‘Big House’. As a consequence, the ‘garden’ began to move away from the immediate environs of the house and, in many cases, out of sight of the house itself, creating an even more natural feel to the redesigned landscape.

Although Capability Brown never made it to Ireland, he had his Irish disciples, most notably Dean Swift and the Delanys. The following is a typical informal Brownian ‘garden’ as described by the Halls: ‘In the demesne of Altadore, a small glen called the ‘Hermitage’, for which nature has done much, and art more. And here is another of the magnificent waterfalls for which the country is so famous. It is but one of the many attractions in this delicious spot; the grounds have been laid out with exceeding taste, the walks through it are very varied; and considerable judgment and skill have been exhibited in planting and ‘trimming’—the one being even more necessary than the other where the growth is rapid and luxuriant—as to obtain a new and striking view almost at every step.’

The Halls’ account oscillates between describing the naturally occurring forms of nature and artificial constructions, reflecting their tendencies to interpenetrate each other in the concrete reality of the garden itself. With regard to ‘planting and trimming’, the social process of design is combined with the natural processes of the plants, the ‘rapid and luxuriant growth’. As a consequence, the artificial aspects of ‘this delicious spot’, except for the physical walkways, tend to be disguised—hidden from view because the artificial features of the garden are in its design. In manicuring the surface appearance of the plants and purposely arranging the spatial relationships between the natural entities of the new ecosystem of the English Informal garden to ‘mimic’ the visual characteristics of the picturesque framework, the gardener was ‘redesigning’ nature in an idealistic way.

Thus, the construction of a picturesque ‘spot’, like the Hermitage above, is a result of an intended manipulation of nature to reflect an image and ideology concerning society’s relationship to nature. The ‘natural’ garden of the picturesque is, therefore, in a real concrete sense, an embodied ideology. Gallagher suggests that the emergence of the English informal garden in the middle of the eighteenth century indicated a societal change of perspective towards nature in general. The new perspective of the picturesque saw man’s position as being within nature itself, rather than as an agent to tame and regulate its forces as in the Dutch and French formal gardens. In the picturesque, nature cannot be conquered and at best only certain aspects of it can be manicured by society for its own ends. This tension between nature and society is materially manifested in the spatial difference between the beautiful and sublime aspects of the picturesque landscape as revealed in the following from the Hall’s description of the Crampton estate at Lough Bray:

‘The wall that surrounds these grounds is not, in some places as high as the bank of peat within a few feet of it, and the contrast between the neglect, the desolation, the barrenness that reign without, and the beauty within, is very striking, exhibiting the mastery which science and civilization hold over nature even in her sternest and most rugged domain. The cottage and grounds are here, in this lofty and unreclaimed region, ‘like Tadmor in the wilderness, or an oasis in the desert’.’

The spatial contrast between ‘the neglect and the barrenness’ of the bog outside the walls with the ‘order and cultivation’ of the garden within is further conceptualized in the aesthetic dualism of the beautiful and the sublime. The ‘beautiful’ in the above quotation, which exhibits the application of ‘science and civilization’, is located within the walls of the parkland. On the other hand, the sublime refers to the wilderness of the peat bog without. As a consequence, the sublime aspect of the picturesque could only be appropriated visually into the picturesque landscape as a backdrop to the beautiful within the garden itself. The landscape gardener could only physically reshape the beautiful aspects of the picturesque—those within the walls of the parkland—by constructing water features such as artificial lakes and meandering rivers, and planting alternating bands of grass and trees in the foreground and middle ground of the parkland. The sublime features of the picturesque could not be planted successively in the parkland without losing those characteristics which define them as sublime (i.e., being truly ‘natural’ and ‘awe-inspiring and fearful feeling’). These sublime characteristics can only be achieved by looking into the vast uncultivated wastes of bog land beyond the comfortable confines of the ‘beautiful’ walled gardens.

The ‘politics’ of the picturesque in Ireland: The 5 detached peasantry of the sublime

The landlords of Ireland were pivotal in the picturesque movement, commissioning journeymen painters to depict their demesnes in this style, educating their families in the connoisseurship of romantic, picturesque principles, and constructing picturesque gardens on their estates. The Halls, in their travelogue, explicitly praise the ‘beautiful spots’ of the picturesque, acknowledging the landlords’ gardening endeavors. However, this public appreciation likely had a practical aspect, as permission was needed from the landlords to access these spots. In County Wicklow, the Halls identify twelve owners of sixteen picturesque locations, with villages and towns mentioned only in passing. This perspective reflects the culture of the picturesque adopted by the landowning elite, which proved repressive to the native, peasant population and their sense of place.

By focusing solely on the picturesque aspects of the landed estates, the Halls’ narrative omits the working, productive aspects of these estates, fostering the notion of a socially empty space and ideologically detaching the peasantry from the landscape. This omission mirrors the silences of seventeenth-century cartographers who excluded the cabins of the native Irish from their maps, effectively erasing the peasantry from the picturesque narrative of Ireland.

The picturesque’s definition of certain areas as ‘hovels’ had significant implications for the occupants, suggesting that the nineteenth-century maps imposed a spatial discipline on the rural peasantry similar to the time discipline imposed on industrial workers by the clock. The picturesque introduced an aesthetic discipline, barring the peasantry from accessing land for productive purposes and leading to evictions when their dwellings were deemed unsightly for the picturesque landscape.

Edward Said views this spatial coercion as a form of geographical violence, part of an act of geographical violence through imperialism, where every space is explored, charted, and controlled. The picturesque in Ireland underwent similar stages of cultural imperialism, with picturesque connoisseurs exploring and capturing new spots, and controlling access to conserve them for their enjoyment, effectively barring the local population from these areas.

The picturesque’s transformation of the Irish landscape and the introduction of foreign flora species were part of a broader cultural and ecological expansion that followed the routes of the British Empire. While most introduced species integrated into the Irish ecosystems without much disruption, some, like the rhododendron, proved problematic. Despite the picturesque’s imposed nature, the aesthetic experience it provided was generally pleasing to the strolling connoisseur, masking the reality of its enforced imposition and creating ideological enclaves within the parklands.

The Picturesque Theme Park

The spatial aspect of the picturesque was crucial to the emergence of the picturesque as a theme park. Here, at the concrete level of spatial relationships, the circulation of the cultural picturesque forms allowed the garden design to move through space and time and circulate as commodities. Therefore, this social process of circulation of the picturesque began its life as an ideological perspective in the paintings and texts of its connoisseurs. This had a specific structure to it (its visuality) and a particular history of development over time and space (its cultural connoisseurship in the Romantic Movement). The actual spatial realization of this ideological perspective was achieved in the gardening techniques of the English informal style, where the garden designs of the picturesque consciously reflected the sensibilities of the picturesque in the spatial arrangements between the plants. The ‘planting’ of the picturesque constructed its location as a cultural enclave within a wider landscape of the Irish countryside. According to Crandell:

“This is the pivotal moment in the pictorialization of nature: what is designed (and owned) is composed to give the illusion of being natural, when in fact it is maintained as an enclave. To create the illusion, Brown’s garden used compositional conventions taken from painting. … Increasingly it meant something visual: a forested landscape with serpentine clearings.”

The picturesque enclave was therefore a constructed environment, owned and controlled by the landed gentry. It was their and their advisors’ interpretation of the picturesque that prevailed in the garden. The dominance of the designers/landlords in constructing their own specific version of the picturesque within these spatial enclaves was necessary to prevent the emergence of alternative ‘realities’, thereby disrupting the overall imagineering process. Within the boundary walls and through the gated lodges of the parklands, however, the experience of the picturesque enclave as documented by the travelogue writers and artists was not of domination and constraint imposed by the landlord class upon the connoisseurs, but the opposite: feelings of unrestrained mobility and freedom. Here lies the power of illusion inherent in theme parking, where the necessary form of design domination with its physically embedded aesthetic structure produced by the direct producers was subsumed under the cultural form of how that aesthetic form actually was experienced with its sense of free and unrestrained movement. It was the parks’ constructed topography that connected the embedded design structure to the sense of free spatial movement. As a consequence, the theme park designers found it necessary to distinguish between differing experiences of movement with regard to the body and its eyes, as Crandell suggests in the following:

“In painting, the rise and fall, advance and recess, and convexity and concavity of form has the same effect of creating movement as do hill and dale, foreground and distance, and swelling and sinking, in the landscape. For the spectator in an actual landscape, however, topographic relief does more than affect the eyes; it creates a distinction between eyes and feet and becomes a design principle that mandates that the foot should never travel by the same route as the eye. The eyes can travel quickly, ‘irritated’ by lights and shades, while the feet stroll leisurely over hill and dale.”

In the picturesque landscape, bodily movement was not explicitly determined or directly controlled by physical structures. There was no obvious process of focalization as in the more formal French and Italian gardens. The only exception to this tendency was in the proximity of the ‘big house’, and through wooded areas, where footpaths were constructed. As a consequence, the picturesque stroller was allowed to wander free and unrestrained, and this opportunity for undirected movement was determined by the lack of focalizing straight lines. The dominance of the serpentine design feature had the tendency to encourage the sensation of free, unrestrained bodily movement through this spatial enclave, but eye movements were controlled by the scenic sights provided by the landscape gardener. For example, in Kent’s gardens, the spectator was led from one ‘picture’ to another as “a continued series of new and delightful scenes at every step you take.” The differing physical movement and the differing pace of that movement between the body and the eye allowed the gardener the opportunity to design into the garden a sense of dramatic unfolding as the visual scenes ‘lured’ the body to move through the landscape. However, the visually exciting aesthetic appearance of the ‘scenes’ within the landscape had to be complemented by easy bodily movement through that landscape in order for the stroller to experience a feel-good effect. Any discomfort from any side of this sensory dichotomy would destroy the pleasure of the other.

Theme parking involved complete sensory cocooning from all possible undesirable sensations and for this to happen it had to occur in a controlled environment like picturesque parkland. However, the immediate aesthetic and sensory experiences were usually expressed either in the compositional forms of the picturesque (e.g., beautiful, sublime) or in the conceptual forms of sensory movement (e.g., unrestrained, free) or in both forms of sensory appreciation. When the ‘cocooning’ worked and the aesthetic experience was deemed to be successful, there was a strong temptation to use more allegorical forms of expressions in summarizing the overall experience. These more abstract associational concepts tended to symbolize a moral and spiritual meaning for these picturesque gardens. Concepts such as ‘idyllic’, ‘Arcadian’, ‘Virgilian’, ‘pastoral’, and even ‘utopian’ were appearing in cultural texts summarizing the picturesque experience: “What we are presented with in a Brown park is, apparently, a whole ‘world’. This world is Utopian in concept, offering a kind of perfection to the senses, where every alien or untoward element has been gracefully banished.”

The designed physical structures of the picturesque theme park and the immediate aesthetic categories that mediated and conceptualized the landscape as a ‘feel-good’ experience such as ‘beautiful’, ‘serene’, ‘serpentine’, and so on were appropriated by the allegorical concepts as their ontological conditions of existence. The constructed openness and physically uninterrupted lawns not only evoked feelings of freedom of physical mobility but also more philosophical feelings of political freedom, which could even emerge across the Atlantic:

“This appearance (of uninterrupted openness), however, is the consequence of design and calculated manipulation. The extraordinary appeal of this design in American landscape architecture is surely a result of the fact that the landscape garden’s potential for undirected movement feels like and looks like freedom.”

However, all of these grand allegorical concepts were conditional on the recognition of the aesthetic landscape categories being present in these garden enclaves and never vice-versa. The idea of the landscape garden being a ‘utopian world’ could not emerge unless that particular enclave had met all the aesthetic criteria necessary to fulfill the requirements of the ‘picturesque’ category. It is at this point, where these over-determined idealistic concepts were being applied not only to these spatial enclaves but were also being accepted without criticism, that the picturesque landscape became iconic of the political ideals and aspirations of the landowning class. These ideological categories of the picturesque have moved from the various cultural practices of art, philosophy, and travel writing to become ‘spatialized’ in the design forms of the informal English garden, waiting, like ancient hieroglyphics, to be interpreted by the connoisseur and thereby to emerge again as not just a conceptual expression of an aesthetic experience, but as an ideology reflecting the ideals and social values of the landed elite class. In doing so it provided a meaningless dream of a new ‘world’ beyond the gritty reality of everyday life and, especially, class relationships. Like all theme parks, they were about escape from the physical spaces of mundane reality into a space of idealized nature, and escape from the harsh realities of everyday economic life into an idealized dream world of democracy exclusively for the landowning elite:

“In a more general sense, the landscape garden’s forms were presented as a political challenge to the brash, worldly, and authoritarian attitudes that the English attributed to the axial and geometric French gardens. The English landscape garden was taken to be more natural because it was rooted in a democracy.”

Yet it was only democracy for the few: the ones who controlled the ideological and material production of the picturesque. However, in its own political habitat, the English informal garden may have been accepted as democratic, but such an intellectual flight of fantasy in the context of colonial Ireland came up against a real turbulent political reality, whose inhabitants were ready and willing to disturb the constructed tranquility of the Anglo-Irish landlord’s picturesque gardens. The strength of this particular hegemonic ideology of the picturesque was determined by how it actually became embedded in the physical landscape and how this ideology was continually replicated as these picturesque scenes were reproduced in the paintings/texts of picturesque connoisseurs. The portrayal of a picturesque scene on a landlord’s demesne may have been realistic and authentic of what was physically present to be replicated; the crucial determining factor of the picturesque theme park was that scene was already restructured and manipulated to reflect the picturesque visuality.

Conclusion: Ending the Tyranny of the Picturesque Theme Park

When the Halls had nearly completed their tour of the picturesque ‘spots’ of Co. Wicklow, they decided to visit one last picturesque location: the ruined monastic city of Glendalough. Unlike the other picturesque locations they visited, however, their attempted picturesque reading of the Glendalough landscape was interrupted by the native Irish guides:

“At Glendalough, guides of all degrees start from beneath the bushes, and from amid the crags—we had almost written, and the lake—and ‘they will do anything in the wide world to serve and oblige yer honours’, except leave you to yourselves.”

These amassing guides, these destroyers ‘of the solemn harmony of the surrounding objects’, were initially paid to stay away from the ‘city’ as the two picturesque connoisseurs toured the ruins by themselves, accompanied only by their picturesque compositional framework. However, the Halls had to promise to hire some of the guides the following morning for a guided tour of the site. This they did. Their guided tour was a non-picturesque interpretation of the landscape. The chosen guides provided an oral interpretation that highlighted the spiritual and symbolic aspects of the landscape mostly associated with St. Kevin’s life. There was no mention of the picturesque qualities, which the Halls had discovered the previous evening. This new oral interpretation of the Irish landscape not only challenged the dominance of the picturesque as a cultural form, but the contestation between the differing landscape interpretations had a class basis to it. The picturesque was a cultural attribute of the landed elite, while the oral interpretation was a crucial ingredient of the local peasant culture. In the spatial area of Glendalough and through the competing perspectives of the Halls and the peasant guides, the landscape of the ruined city became contested. This occurred because Glendalough was not on a landlord’s demesne, but rather was located on old ecclesiastical lands—not a ‘picturesque’ theme park.

The spatial control within the parklands allowed the landlords the conditions to create and continually reproduce the picturesque visibility. When this crucial element of spatial control was lost (i.e., where the picturesque attempted to impose its ideological interpretation beyond the secure boundaries of the parkland and subsequently without the necessary societal force of private property), this hegemonic visuality could and was challenged by the natives and their non-picturesque interpretation of place.

Finally, the theme parks of the picturesque met their own demise with the fall of landlordism in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, some of the old picturesque grounds, and especially their wooded areas, became the drilling and training grounds for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the war of independence. Such an occurrence happened on the picturesque demesne of Dunboy Castle, the residence of the Puxley family on the Bere Peninsula. In a very real sense, the political ‘sublime’ forces of the IRA in scaling the walls of the ‘beautiful’ garden closed the chapter on this particular theme park of the picturesque.

Notes on contributor

Eamonn Slater is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University
of Ireland, Maynooth. He has edited two books with his colleague, Dr Michel Peillon: Encounters with Modern Ireland (1998) and Memories of the Present (2000). He 10 is currently researching Marx’s ideas on ecology and the Irish Famine, car dependency and suburbia in Ireland.

Notes and references

1. Recently there has been a lot discussion among cultural theorists of theme parks and
   the theming of urban America. Most of this work has been concerned with the ‘Disney- fication’ of modern consumption patterns. See Fjellman, S. (1992) Vinyl Leaves: Walt
   Disney and America, Westview Press, Oxford; Gottdiener, M. (2001) The Theming of 20 America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies and Themed Environments, Westview Press, Oxford; Sorkin, M. (1992) Variations on a Theme Park: The American City and the End ofPublic Space, Noonday Press, New York; Wasko, J. (2001) Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, Polity Press, Oxford; Zukin, S. (1993) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Gottdiener comes closest to the idea that theme parks existed before Disney in his work The Theming of America.
2. Duffy, P. (1994) ‘The landscape artist as witness to the changing rural landscape’, in Art into History, eds B. Kennedy & R. Gillespie, Townhouse Press, Dublin; Somerville-Large, P. (1995) The Irish Country House: A Social History, Sinclair- Stevenson, London. According to Duffy (’The landscape artist’, p. 15), the demesne walls of the Irish landed estate had no equivalent in England. Some of these walls were impressive in both length and height. The Coole estate had all of its 600 acres walled in (Somerville-Large, The Irish Country House, p. 136).
3. Woods, C. J. (1992) ‘Review article: Irish travel writings as source material’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 110, pp. 171–183.
4. Hall, S. C. (1853) Handbooks for Ireland: Dublin and Wicklow, Dean & Son, London.
5. Mokyr, J. (1983) Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the IrishEconomy, George Allen & Unwin, London.
6. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 99.
7. Barrel, J. (1972) The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840, CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, p. 21.
8. Gombrich, E. R. (1973) The Story of Art, Phaidon Press, London, p. 309.
9. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 100.
10. The dualism of the beautiful and the sublime has a long history of evolution in Aesthet-
    ics (see Le Bris, M. (1981) Romantics and Romanticism, Skira, Geneva, pp. 28–30), but 45 it was not until the 1760s that the first British (and Irish) pictorial representation of
    the sublime was painted. This coincided with the publication of Edmund Burke’s

treatise (Burke, E. (1990 [1757]) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the

Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, Oxford).

11. Stuart, D. C. (1979) Georgian Garden, Robert Hale, London, p. 83.
12. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry, p. 36.
13. Barrel, The Idea of Landscape, p. 6.
14. Bell, D. (1993) ‘Framing nature: First steps into the wilderness for the sociologyof the landscape’, Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, p. 22; Barrel, The Idea of Landscape,p. 6.
15. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 157
16. The Trinity College political economist of the 1840s and 1850s, William NeilsonHancock, argued that legal statutes prevented the tenants from investing in improve- ments on their holdings, such as drainage and tree planting in his work (see Hancock, W.N. (1850) Impediments to the Prosperity of Ireland, Simms & McInture, London). With Terrence McDonough, I argued that Irish rural economy was dominated by a feudal mode of production rather than by the capitalist mode of production in the nineteenth century. Because of the way Ireland was colonised by Britain, the Anglo- Irish landlords were ceded an enormous amount of political and legal power, which allowed them to ‘rackrent’ their tenantry in a feudal way (Slater, E. & McDonough, T. (1994) ‘Bulwark of landlordism and capitalism: The dynamics of feudalism in nineteenth-century Ireland’, Research in Political Economy, vol. 14. pp. 63–118).
17. Reeves-Smith, T. (1997) ‘The natural history of demesnes’, in Nature in Ireland: A Scien- tific and Cultural History, eds J. Foster & H. Chesney, Lilliput Press, Dublin, p. 551.
18. McCullagh, N. & Mulvin, V. (1987) A Lost Tradition: The Nature of Architecture in Ireland, Gandon Press, London, p. 67.
19. Stuart, Georgian Garden, p. 42.
20. McCullagh & Mulvin, A Lost Tradition, p. 67.
21. Stuart, Georgian Garden, p. 42.
22. In 1762, the Duke of Leinster wrote to Capability Brown in England and offered him£1,000 to come to Ireland to create a picturesque garden at his Carton estate, but Brown allegedly refused stating that he had first of all to finish England (see Dooley, T. & Mallaghan, C. (2006) Carton House: An Illustrated History, Costar Associates, Celbridge, p. 58).
23. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 162.
24. Trees had to be planted in specific ‘picturesque’ locations, trimmed and pruned, andthey had to be replaced when damaged. The grass had not only to be cut (by scythes and/or grazing livestock), but also it had to be brushed and swept. Non-picturesque natural entities of the local ecosystem tended to be eliminated in the classical Brown- ian landscape: ‘every irregularity and blemish has to be manicured out of existence.’ A messy line of reeds, brambles, nettles and bushes was never his intention. It was important either to mow or else let the cattle browse right up to the water’s edge (Turner, R. (1985) Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-century English Landscape, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, pp. 81–82).
25. Gallagher, L. (1989) ‘Nature improved and raised by art’, The Shaping of the Ulster Landscape: Ulster Local Studies, vol. 11, p. 34.
26. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 104.
27. Clifford, D. (1962) A History of Garden Design, Faber & Faber, London, p. 173.
28. Bellamy, D. (1986) The ‘Wild’ Boglands: Bellamy’s Ireland, Christopher Helm, London.
29. Somerville, E. & Ross, V. M. (1990) Through Connemara in a Governess Cart, VirgoPress, London, p. 168.

30. MacDonagh, O. (1983) States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780–1980, George Allen & Unwin, London, p. 29.
31. Harley, J. B. (1988) ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in The Iconography of Landscape, eds D. Cosgrove & S. Daniels, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 292.
32. Gallagher, ‘Nature improved by art’, p. 42.
33. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus, London, p. 271.
34. Gibbons suggests that the opening up of the picturesque locations of Ireland to the‘modern’ traveller in the 1740s was one of the founding moments of European Romanticism (Gibbons, L. (1996) ‘Topographies of terror: Killarney and the politics of the sublime’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 25, p. 95).
35. Crandell, G. (1993) Nature Pictorialized: ‘The View’ in Landscape History, Johns Hopkins University Press, London, p. 129.
36. O’Kane suggests that there was a prevalence of peasant resentment at the disposses- sion of their ancestral lands and a firm belief that they might be restored to them one day (O’Kane, F. (2004) Landscape Design in Eighteenth-century Ireland, Cork University Press, Cork, p. 173).
37. Reeves-Smith, ‘The natural history of demesnes’, p. 556.
38. In the first fifty years of the eighteenth century, 61 trees and 91 new shrubs wereintroduced into England. Many of these global plant species were re-routed to the colonies including Ireland (Dixon-Hunt, J. (2003) The Picturesque Garden in Europe, Thames & Hudson, London, p. 45).
39. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 130.
40. Archer, K. (1997) ‘The limits to the imagineered city: Sociospatial polarization inOrlando’, Economic Geography, vol. 73, no. 3, p. 334.
41. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 125.
42. Ingram, D. L. (1991) Basic Principles of Landscape Design, University of Florida, CIR536 25Document, Department of Environmental Horticulture, p. 5.
43. Hussey, C. (1967) The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, Cass, London, p. 130.
44. Turner, Capability Brown, p. 78.
45. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 126.
46. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 126.
47. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 127.
48. Slater, E. (1993) ‘Contested terrain: Differing interpretations of Co. Wicklow’s land-scape’, Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, p. 45.
49. Williams, R. A. (1991) The Berehaven Copper Mines, Northern Mine Research Society,Sheffield, p. 179.
50. In the twentieth century, other ‘chapters’ of the picturesque theme park werereopened as backdrops to the new emerging corporate golf courses in Ireland and the movie industry. Ireland’s most famous film, The Quiet Man, was filmed mostly in the picturesque grounds of Ashford Castle, Co. Mayo.

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