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points in time. Place thus appears not an essentially static category, a simple
background to experience, but a dynamic one which is in a constant dialogue
with its human observer, and that observing position is all the more signifi¬
cant as it is located within that particular place, forming a part of it, either on
a permanent basis or for the limited duration of observation.
According to John Agnew, place as “meaningful location” is characterised
by the three aspects of location, locale and sense of place.* While location is
the simple spatial definition of a place, locale is already more closely related
to human presence since it is “the material setting for social relations - the
actual shape of place within which people conduct their lives as individuals."
However, it is the third element, sense of place, that provides the thorough¬
ly human aspect of place to complement the previous two items - sense of
place “means the subjective and emotional attachment people have to place.”®
While this is challenged by the process of globalisation, especially by its ho¬
mogenising effect,’ it is still a major aspect that informs individual under¬
standing of places. Literary renderings of places stem principally from this as¬
pect as they represent the personal experience of this category, therefore they
express exactly that subjective and emotional attachment that is identified
as sense of place. Heaney’s choice of title for his essay reflects this conviction,
and his use of the term falls in line with this strand of theoretical discussion
concerning the relation of space and place.
While the essay begins with the idea of the two ways of knowing a place
quoted above, Heaney broadens his interpretive horizon by incorporating
further cultural layers into the understanding of place which possess a special
importance in the Irish literary tradition. The link between original Irish
place names and history, real as well as legendary, manifests in the tradition
of the dinnséanchas. By metonymic transfer the act of encoding is extended
implicitly to the landscape, the tangible physical referent of place names, thus
the Irish landscape is eventually a repository of “the underlay of Gaelic leg¬
end”.® This layer, however, is only available through the effort of learning due
to the decline of the language and the colonial act of the early 19" century
Ordnance Survey which renamed the Irish countryside in its entirety, leading
to the fading and nearly complete loss of the cultural subtext of place names.
As a result, the experience of place appeals principally to the “aesthetic eye”
and remains little more than “a visual pleasure”.? As a consequence of Yeats’s
inscription of certain places into his poetry, however, there is another ex¬
perience of place which can illustrate the fusion of culture and landscape.
Although this differs from the communal scope of the earlier legendary due
to its personal origin and reference, its mechanism operates in an analogous
Tim Cresswell, Place: a short introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 7
Cresswell, Place: a short introduction, 7
Cresswell, Place: a short introduction, 7
cf. Cresswell, Place: a short introduction, 8
Heaney, Preoccupations, 132
Heaney, Preoccupations, 132
oonoue