THE UNMAPPABLE PARISH: BALLYMAGALEEN FROM PTOLEMY TO GOOGLE EARTH

 THE UNMAPPABLE PARISH: BALLYMAGALEEN FROM PTOLEMY TO GOOGLE EARTH 

Giles na Magaleen 

 Abstract This article examines Ballymagaleen as a topological, anthropological and cartographic problem from classical geography to satellite mapping. Beginning with Strabo’s silences and Ptolemy’s more suspicious certainties, it traces the peninsula’s intermittent appearance in monastic glosses, estate maps, imperial surveys, parish memories and digital geographies. Particular attention is given to de Selby’s theory that Ballymagaleen is not a place in the ordinary sense, but an Antipodean mirror-resonance misread by mapmakers as coastline. The article argues that Ballymagaleen has survived by being almost, but not quite, findable.  

Article Structure  1. Introduction: The Parish as Problem  2. Strabo’s Silence and the Uses of Non-Attestation  3. Ptolemy’s Western Defect: Coordinates, Cod and Conjecture  4. The Peninsula That Washes Away: Isthmus, Tide and Municipal Liability  5. Anthropology of the Inhabitants: Kinship, Pub-Law and the Argumentative Economy  6. The Holy Well, the Trout of Doubt and Other Liquid Authorities  7. De Selby’s Antipodean Mirror-Resonance Hypothesis  8. Ordnance, Disorder and the Surveyor’s Nervous Complaint  9. Google Earth, Failed Pinning and the Crisis of Algorithmic Parishhood  10. Conclusion: Towards a Negative Geography of Ballymagaleen  

Introduction: The Parish as Problem  Ballymagaleen has long enjoyed the distinction, rare among Irish settlements, of being more frequently described than located. In the annals, maps, rentals, shipping notices, electoral returns, ballads, drinking songs, chancery papers and police memoranda in which its name appears, the place is treated with that peculiar confidence reserved for things known chiefly by men who have not been there. 

The traveller approaches Ballymagaleen by road, tide, memory, inheritance, rumour and, in one regrettable case, by bicycle from Skibbereen; yet in every instance the final mile becomes topologically evasive. The lane forks where no fork is shown. The headland appears west of itself. The harbour is below the village except in bad weather, when it is morally above it. The isthmus joining the peninsula to the mainland is present on fair days, absent during storms and politically ambiguous at all times.1  It is therefore inadequate to call Ballymagaleen remote. Remoteness is a measurable inconvenience. Ballymagaleen is not inconvenient in that vulgar sense. It is not far away; it is wrongly near. It suffers from what de Selby, in his least deniable period, called ‘proximate displacement’: the condition of a locality which can be reached by anyone except the person attempting to reach it. 2De Selby’s later view, that Ballymagaleen represented an interpolation of mirror-resonance from the Antipodes, has often been dismissed as the sort of theory that might occur to a man who mistook a shaving mirror for a colonial archive. Yet the theory has the merit, uncommon in scholarship, of being no more absurd than the evidence it seeks to explain.  

The earliest classical authorities are of limited assistance. Strabo, whose omission of Ballymagaleen has been taken by hostile commentators as evidence that it did not exist, is silent on many matters of equal importance, including the exact location of Dooley’s pub, the proper economic status of a toasted sandwich and the seasonal movements of the Trout of Doubt.3 Silence, as Professor Móirín Ní Fhuiseog has observed in her celebrated essay ‘On Not Being Mentioned by Greeks’, may indicate ignorance, suppression, indifference, defective vellum, or that the place in question had already had words with the author and was no longer inviting him to functions.4  

Ptolemy is more troublesome, for he had the scholar’s vice of giving coordinates to things he had not personally inconvenienced. The Geographia contains several western promontories, estuaries and peoples whose relation to the Irish Atlantic fringe has exercised antiquaries since the eighteenth century, or at least since the invention of bad tracing paper.5 Ballymagaleen does not appear by name, but in the corrupt Alexandrian recension discovered by Canon Tadhg O’Ribble in a locked press at the back of St Príomhsheans’ School for All Abilities and None, there occurs a marginal note usually translated as ‘here the land turns away, ashamed of itself’.6 This, O’Ribble argued, could only refer to Ballymagaleen, since no other Irish peninsula had, by the second century, acquired sufficient self-consciousness to evade geometry.  The objection, advanced by the more literal school of cartographic historians, is that O’Ribble’s manuscript was written in blue biro on the back of a 1957 turf-cutting licence.7 That objection is weighty, but not fatal. Manuscripts have often survived in unlikely forms. The Book of Kells came down to us through violence, theft, damp and piety; the O’Ribble Fragment through parish stationery, diocesan economy and a dispute over a wheelbarrow. To exclude it merely because it is convenient, recent and obviously fabricated would be to impose upon Irish studies a standard of evidential hygiene which, if applied retrospectively, would empty several respectable shelves and most county museums. 

 Topologically, Ballymagaleen is best understood not as a bounded place, but as a behaviour of space under social pressure. The village lies near the harbour, the harbour lies south of the village, Cashelmagaleen House commands the summit of Sleevecaccbow and Brutalstown House decays towards the western tip. This much is agreed. The difficulty begins when one attempts to put these facts on the same map. Estate maps held in the private papers of the O’Magaleen family place Cashelmagaleen House at three different elevations, two of them theological.8

The Ordnance Survey, during its first intervention, sent out six men, two chains, one theodolite and a young assistant named Swithin, returning after nine days with a sketch of a goat, a bill for porter and the professional conclusion that ‘the district resists reduction’.9  Later surveys were more ambitious and less sane. A nineteenth-century coast chart shows Ballymagaleen as a warning to shipping, which is fair enough, though the warning appears inland. An Admiralty correction of 1874 removed the peninsula altogether, only for it to reappear in 1876 as a shoal, a parish and a ‘possible ecclesiastical extrusion’.10 

By the time the Rural District Council commissioned its own commemorative map in 1923, the cartographer had abandoned scale and resorted to temperament, representing the village in green, the pubs in a darker green, the holy well in a suggestive blue and the isthmus as a dotted moral proposition.11  The anthropological evidence is no less unstable. 

Ballymagaleen society rests upon four institutions: the parish, the pub, the argument and the family tree adjusted for visitors from Boston. The parish provides sacramental structure; the pub provides liquidity; the argument provides motion; and the genealogical enterprise provides export income by proving to Americans that they descend from kings, saints, poets, rebels, horse-thieves or, at a discount, bishops.12

Kinship in Ballymagaleen is not a biological category but a negotiating position. A man may be your cousin for the purposes of a funeral, your enemy for the purposes of land, your uncle for the purposes of drink and no relation whatever when the Guards arrive. This has led Dr Emer Mac an Ultaigh to describe the local system as ‘segmentary opportunism’, a phrase rejected by the parish council only because it sounded too easily grant-funded.13  

De Selby entered this dispute with characteristic immodesty. In The Reflected Parish, a book printed on paper so absorbent that several copies had to be rescued from themselves, he argued that Ballymagaleen is produced by a reflective sympathy between Ireland and the Antipodes.14 According to de Selby, certain western parishes do not occupy terrestrial space directly. Rather, they arise when colonial longing, Atlantic damp and southern-hemisphere sunlight meet at an angle too fine for ordinary instruments. The mapmaker, perceiving the interference pattern, mistakes it for coastline; the local inhabitant, perceiving the mapmaker, mistakes him for an opportunity.  This theory explains what conventional geography cannot: why Ballymagaleen appears in memory before it appears in sight; why the road signs point with embarrassment rather than confidence; why Google Earth, when invited to identify the place, enlarges the surrounding fields, sharpens the roofline of Dooley’s and then quietly gives up. The algorithm, trained upon roads, roofs and commercial establishments, cannot process a district whose primary outputs are recollection, grievance, genealogy, weather and unpaid talk. It can see the peninsula. It cannot admit that the peninsula is looking back.  

Author Biography Giles na Magaleen is an independent scholar, reluctant topographer and hereditary observer of Ballymagaleen. His research interests include Irish absurdity, parish anthropology, cartographic evasion and the moral economy of pubs. Recent work has appeared nowhere reputable, though often in conversation, which is the older and better medium. 

1 Séamas Ó Dálaigh, The Tidal Parish: Notes Towards a Wet Topology of the Irish West, Ballymagaleen: Trout of Doubt Press, 1988, pp. 11–13. 

2 de Selby, The Reflected Parish: An Essay on Antipodean Interference, Portarlington: Institute for Nocturnal Geography, 1936, p. 4. 

3 Strabo, Geography, trans. H.L. Jones, London: Heinemann, 1917, p. 203. Strabo does not mention Ballymagaleen, which has been taken here as a deliberate and therefore significant non-reference. 

4 Móirín Ní Fhuiseog, ‘On Not Being Mentioned by Greeks: Silence, Shame and Western Peninsulas’, Journal of Hiberno-Hellenic Resentment, vol. 7, no. 2, 1974, pp. 44–9. 

5 Ptolemy, Geographia, ed. Claudius H. Fidgett, Leipzig: Institut für Misplaced Promontories, 1899, pp. 80–83. 

6 Canon Tadhg O’Ribble, ‘The Alexandrian Biro Fragment and Its Implications for South-Western Parish Cartography’, Proceedings of the Ballymagaleen Antiquarian and Licensed Premises Society, vol. 1, 1958, pp. 1–6. 

7 Nuala Ní Bhraonáin, Forgery, Faith and Filing Cabinets: Minor Documents of the Irish Ecclesiastical West, Tuam: St Jarlath’s Occasional Press, 1992, pp. 154–8. 

8 Estate Map of Cashelmagaleen and Dependencies, undated, O’Magaleen Papers, private collection, tin trunk under stairs, no catalogue number. 

9 Swithin Plumley, Field Notebook, 14–23 August 1838, Ordnance Survey Papers, Dublin Office of Reluctant Measurement, OS/BAL/Confused/9. 

10 Admiralty Chart Correction Circular, 1876, Hydrographic Office, London, Collection of Doubtful Coasts, HC/IRL/204/7. 

11 Ballymagaleen Rural District Council, Commemorative Map Subcommittee Minutes, 3 May 1923, Ballymagaleen Herald Archive, box labelled ‘Maps, Rates and Other Fictions’. 

12 Aibithe O’Nann, ‘Diaspora Bloodlines and the Retail Uses of Chieftaincy’, Ballymagaleen Herald, 17 March 1998, p. 2. 

13 Emer Mac an Ultaigh, ‘Kinship as Alibi: Preliminary Notes from a Parish That Denies Everything’, Anthropology of the Uncooperative, vol. 3, 2009, pp. 77–93. 

14 de Selby, Reflected Parish, pp. 19–20. 

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