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30 | Peter Dolmänyos 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 significant 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 thoroughly 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 homogenising effect,’ it is still a major aspect that informs individual understanding of places. Literary renderings of places stem principally from this aspect 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 legend”.® 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 experience 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
