‘Ulster's love in letter'd gold’: the Battle of the Somme and the Ulster Memorial Tower, 1918–1935

Looking at Military Landscapes: Definitions and Approaches

“…It is also possible that the scale of scholarly interest in such sites reflects the fact that the practices of memorialisation on the Western Front constituted such an extraordinary period of symbolic landscape creation in the early 20th century (Bushaway, 1992;Heffernan, 1995). Site-specific assessments of the politics and practices of national and individual memorialisation include studies of the Newfoundland memorial at Beaumont Hammel on the Somme (Gough, 2004), the Canadian national memory at Vimy ridge (Hucker, 2009), the South African memorial at Delville Wood (Foster, 2004), the Passchendaele site on the Somme (Iles, 2003), the Ulster Memorial Tower on the Somme (Switzer & Graham, 2010), and the British war cemeteries and the ideas mobilised through their design (Morris, 1997). We see in such readings of landscape how the morphology of specific landscapes provides a form of text to be read in order to understand prevailing political ideas and sentiments both during a memorial site's construction and subsequently.…”

Looking at Military Landscapes: Definitions and Approaches

“…It is also possible that the scale of scholarly interest in such sites reflects the fact that the practices of memorialisation on the Western Front constituted such an extraordinary period of symbolic landscape creation in the early 20 th century (Bushaway, 1992;Heffernan, 1995). Site-specific assessments of the politics and practices of national and individual memorialisation include studies of the Newfoundland memorial at Beaumont Hammel on the Somme (Gough, 2004), the Canadian national memory at Vimy ridge (Hucker, 2009), the South African memorial at Delville Wood (Foster, 2004), the Passchendaele site on the Somme (Iles, 2003), the Ulster memorial tower on the Somme (Switzer and Graham, 2010), and the British war cemeteries and the ideas mobilised through their design (Morris, 1997). We see in such readings of landscape how the morphology of specific landscapes provides a form of text to be read in order to understand prevailing political ideas and sentiments both during a memorial site's construction.…”

Military landscapes

“…The former Western Front dominates, and sites such as Passchendaele on the Somme stand for the whole of the Great War, despite that conflict's wider territorial reach (Iles, 2003), and multiple sites of remembrance seal places across Belgium and northern France as perpetual landscapes of military aftermath. Identified for their significance as places of national identity construction and reconstruction, site-specific studies include assessments of the Newfoundland memorial at Beaumont Hammel on the Somme (Gough, 2004a), the Canadian national memorial on Vimy ridge (Hucker, 2009), the South African memorial at Delville Wood (Foster, 2004), and the Ulster Memorial Tower also on the Somme (Switzer and Graham, 2010). The constant interplay around these sites of remembrance and forgetting produces 'a palimpsest of overlapping, multi-vocal landscapes', landscapes of ongoing processes (Saunders, 2001: 37) with changing meanings to subsequent generations of visitors (Winter, 2009).…”