Monday night of this year’s 4 Corners Festival took us to a favourite haunt, the Duncairn Arts Centre on the Antrim Road, where a packed house gathered for "Naming Belfast", to hear Father Martin Magill and Dr Paul Tempan take us around the 4 corners of Belfast and down through the years to explore our city by way of the sometimes surprising stories behind its street names.
The origin of this event is that because Martin, one of the 4 Corners Festival founders, doesn't own a TV, he needs to find other ways of switching off, and his latest “hobby” has been researching the street names that he has come across when criss-crossing this the city. This has resulted in the development of a Belfast Street names website belfaststreetnames.com that was launched at last years Imagine! Festival in the Linenhall Library.
For the 4 Corners event he and his collaborator Dr. Tempan, were ably assisted by Linda Ervine who delved into the too frequently forgotten Gaelic history of some of the districts of our relatively young city, which is a patchwork of much older townlands or baile, reflected in the ubiquitous “bally” prefixes.
And the inputs from Martin, Paul and Linda were punctuated by songs from Brian Houston’s huge back-catalogue, with his songs frequently peppered with Belfast place names. Indeed, large as the fan clubs of Martin and Linda (and perhaps Paul) might be, and whilst there may be a large hidden group of people, like me, fascinated by local history, I suspect that a large number of those in attendance were Brian Houston groupies, delighted at a small free gig. And he didn't disappoint, but played a range of pieces with his customary passion and interacted with the other contributors with humour. With Brian coming originally from the Braniel Estate in east Belfast, Linda was delighted to point out to him that whilst the name Braniel might come from either the Irish Broinngheal meaning "bright front" or Bruach Uí Néill , or "O'Neill's slope/bank" (referring to overlordship of Castlereagh by the O’Neill clan which came to an end with Conn O’Neill in the 17th century), most of the estate falls into the old townland of Carnamuck from the Irish from Ceathrú na Muc meaning, unromantically, the “quarterland of the pigs”.
It was a fascinating evening, hearing how Irish, Planter, Imperial, religious, and personal stories interwove to produce the rich tapestry of street names that criss-cross our city. Martin was later delighted to encounter a former Council architect who was responsible for some of the more recent names to be added to our cityscape.
However, as the evening went on my thoughts drifted from the lyrics of Brian Houston’s songs, to another Belfast wordsmith, born in Clifton Park Avenue, a few hundred yards from Duncairn Arts Centre, a former Presbyterian Church (but baptised in Agnes Street Methodist) – John Hewitt, the poet. Amongst his prodigious output he wrote one poem entitled “Street Names”, which reminds us, that whatever the origins of the street names and areas of our city, and no matter how interested we are in their history, for many of us who lived through this city’s recent history, many of those names are coloured by events that we heard about in the news, or were regarded as “no-go” zones, depending on our own backgrounds. Part of the ethos of the 4 Corners Festival is to both acknowledge and defuse that… encouraging people to explore corners and streets of this city that would once have been alien to them, or to see familiar streets through fresh eyes.
One of the events where we physically do that each year is the Wonderful Wander, which Jim Deeds and I usually lead. Last year took us from Carnamuck/Ceathrú na Muc or the “quarterland of the pigs” down to the Newtownards Road where my older brothers grew up, and which has all manner of resonances, good and not so good, for many. This year Jim sadly couldn’t join us, but Mylie Brennan stepped into the breach, and we led our largest group ever from Writer’s Square, up through one of the oldest and most storied areas of our city in North Belfast, passing Duncairn Arts Centre and finishing at Girdwood Hub, even closer to John Hewitt’s home. With that in mind, one of the poems we finished with was his poem “Street Names” (taken here from “John Hewitt: Selected Poems” edited by Michael Longley and Frank Ormsby, published March 1, 2007 by Blackstaff Press ISBN 9780856408021)
I hear the street names on the radio
and map reported bomb or barricade:
this was my childhood's precinct, and I know
how such streets look, down to the very shade
of brick, of paintwork on each door and sill,
what school or church nearby one might attend,
if there's a chance to glimpse familiar hill
between the chimneys where the grey slates end.
Yet I speak only of appearances,
a stage unpeopled, not the tragic play:
though actual faces of known families
flash back across the gap of fifty years;
can these be theirs, the children that today
rage in the fetters of their fathers' fears?
Sadly, as a contributor to an event on Thursday night noted (more on that anon) many years after that poem was written, and more than 40 years after the IRA and Loyalist ceasefires, there are still children raging in the fetters of the fathers’ and grandfathers’ fears… We all need to do more to make sure that future generations do not associate certain street names of our city with memories of conflict and distress.
Selah
Comments