Niamh Lawlor

Throughout my reading life, I have often found myself as intrigued by an author’s apparently passing reference to the name of a town, village, church, landmark, road or field name as the events unfolding in the work itself. Over the past few years much of my reading has been accompanied by examinations of OS maps and regional history books in an attempt to discover the reality behind places they describe as well as the lives of the communities at their heart. Exploring the local histories and the evolving physical status of the spaces writers are drawn to rarely fails to offer unpredictable insights into their wider creative choices and has instilled within me an awareness of just how much local history has to offer in vividly enhancing examinations of place writing.

My PhD research foregrounds the localities that surround a selection of pre-historic and ancient monuments across the UK and Ireland. Focused on the first half of the twentieth century, my project employs a ‘ground up’ research approach which prioritises gaining an insight into the evolving physical and cultural status of specific monument sites throughout the period as well as how these landmarks were understood and interacted with by the local people living closest to them. This provides a starting point from which to explore how writers of the period creatively respond to these elusive and mysterious spaces in both fiction and non-fiction works. I am particularly interested in exploring the ways in which enthusiasm for these antiquities gained momentum during the first half of the century and how contemporary writing was increasingly seen to advocate for the importance of embodied and self-guided interactions with the sites.