Book Review: Ghosts of Ireland's past in Rebecca Brownlie's Abandoned Ireland

Abandoned Ireland by Rebecca Brownlie

• Abandoned Ireland
• Rebecca Brownlie
• Merrion Press, €27.95

Rebecca Brownlie's beautiful photographic catalogue of deserted properties, large and small, across the island begins with a visit to Cairndhu House, an extraordinary neo-Gothic pile near Larne, and draws to a close in a lavish, chandeliered ballroom with a magnificent blue-domed ceiling, only 50 years old and earmarked for demolition.

In between, we visit a cottage (now knocked down) where the strewn-about contents include an original copy of Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant against Home Rule and a black bowler hat, and other homes where instead images of the Sacred Heart or a past Pope or the Infant of Prague predominate, reduced now to flotsam from the wreckage of Irish Catholicism.

Elsewhere, there is an “Irish Downton Abbey” in Co Tipperary, there are workhouses and asylums, and there is a courthouse, a borstal and a morgue. The northern end of the island, where the author and photographer hails from, is strongly represented, adding its own layer of interest. All in all, it is quite a trip.

Brownlie does a fine job of capturing the austere, battered nobility of certain places, the peeling paints and muted colours, as well as the occasional surprise, like an upright piano with a fabulously intricate carving on its front panel, cutting a lonely figure in an old farmhouse. The exterior photographs seem to have been taken mostly under grey and threatening skies. This is perhaps at least in part the predictable outcome of a photographic venture in Ireland, but the glowering clouds assist in building a mood of abandonment and loss.

In the interior shots, it looks like Rebecca Brownlie has not always photographed things exactly as she found them and now and then arranged them to create striking tableaux — but this is artfully done and doesn’t detract from the authentic feel.

You will hear the doors and floorboards creaking, and you will feel the wind as it whistles through broken windows. You may even find yourself coughing and spluttering as the dust of decades and centuries is gently disturbed.

The results of Brownlie’s efforts are often spooky; and it transpires that she was once part of a paranormal investigation team. Indeed, Abandoned Ireland contains a photograph of what the author suggests could be a ghost.

It is an intriguing image, and the account of how it was taken adds an extra frisson: at the time of taking the picture in a dilapidated convent, Brownlie had not noticed the shape resembling a female silhouette behind a frosted glass door, or the displaced curtain.

The text accompanying the pictures comes in a conversational, sometimes rambling style; and details of the locations are often very sketchy — but this turns out to be deliberate. Brownlie was anxious to preserve the sites she visited from attacks (or further attacks) by vandals.

This book provides food for thought in a multitude of ways. I found myself wondering what a version of Abandoned Ireland published a 100 years from now might contain, what our early 21st century dwellings and offices might look like, the detritus they would house. Stone and wood will have given way to a lot more steel and glass, and perhaps our taste for sleek, open-plan minimalism will have lessened the amount of bric-a-brac and ornaments and hideaways. Newspapers and holy pictures will be few and far between.

It will be left to discarded laptops to gather dust and giant plasma TV screens to hang crookedly on walls.

But, of course, unless as ghosts, we won’t be there to see them.