Strolling carefree on a warm summer morning, my open hand brushes through the long grass and soft rush so typical of the Irish countryside. A traditional, stone-walled cottage lies in ruins, with heath, rush and gorse encroaching on its perimeter as purple foxglove and beaming yellow flag iris poke through the undergrowth to make themselves known.

Image: Ruined cottage at the Irish Hunger Memorial, NYC. Photo by Robin Holland, from brochure: http://bit.ly/1e8vKqM

Momentarily lost in the serenity of this common west-of-Ireland scene, I am abruptly wrenched back to the present time – and place. A yellow taxicab blasts its horn at an unruly cyclist and I am suddenly aware of the distant whine of a siren and the clanging of metal at a nearby construction site. Spinning 180 degrees my gaze moves from the ruined cottage to that of the soaring One World Trading Centre building, or Freedom Tower as it is colloquially known, and the forest of skyscrapers it belongs to.

The presence of a traditional Connemara cottage in downtown Manhattan is a little surprisingly to say the least, but the curiosities don’t end there. Wandering around the quarter acre (a highly symbolic measurement) of transposed land, one soon spots boulders about a metre across lining the pathway. Just outside the entrance of the cottage a large chunk of very distinctively weathered rock catches my eye. “It can’t be…” I whisper to myself as I move closer. But there can be no doubt that this is indeed a boulder of karstified limestone brought to New York from the Burren of County Clare, Ireland. As if to answer my disbelief, “Clare” has even been delicately inscribed into the rock. Beside the limestone sits a coarse grained sedimentary rock with a pink hue and again with fine lettering about two centimetres high – this one reads “Kildare.” Darting my eyes around it looks like there are about twenty-five or thirty boulders among the traditional Irish flora – or maybe thirty-two come to think of it… And with that realisation, the frantic hunt is on for the specimen shipped all the way from my home county. After passing a few granites (Donegal, Wicklow, and Armagh) I soon find a rather unexceptional, moss- and lichen-covered rock sporting the single word “Meath.” It takes a little longer for my friends from Tramore to find Waterford’s representative but it is eventually uncovered hiding in some flowering heather!

New York City’s Irish Hunger Memorial is the work of artist Brian Tolle and was completed in 2002 with the aim of raising “public awareness of the events that led to the famine of 1845 – 52 and to encourage efforts to address current and future hunger worldwide.” The truly unique space comprises a genuine Irish cottage that was dismantled in Attymass, County Mayo, before being shipped to New York and painstakingly reconstructed stone by stone. The entrance to the cottage and the garden itself (see layout below) is through a tunnel accessible on the west side of the memorial. The tunnel and outer walls of the garden are lined with strips of black, fossiliferous limestone from Kilkenny which alternate with horizontal glass bands detailed with hundreds of quotes and writings relating to famine, hunger and population. Old Irish proverbs such as “the well-fed does not understand the lean,” sit alongside quotes from American presidents such as Woodrow Wilson (“Hunger does not breed reform, it breeds madness and all the angry distempers that make an ordered life impossible”) and Bill Clinton (“Every day 25 percent of our food supply is wasted”) and even a snippet from Robert Malthus’s famous essay on population growth.

The focus of this captivating memorial on the banks of the Hudson River is clearly by no means geological but the addition to the scene of a rock from each county in Ireland is a nice touch which engages visitors and, for those of us visiting from across the Atlantic, is sure to ignite a childish desire to track down that little piece of our local neighbourhood. Happy hunting!

Gavin Kenny

Ph.D. student, Department of Geology, Trinity College Dublin

@GavinGKenny

All photos by author unless otherwise stated.

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