The Black Mountians - Belfast
By Changeling
Feb 2007
From a distance, the Black Mountains over Belfast are magnificent -dark, remote and imposing. Driving into them is different. This should be a landscape of pasture and moorland, of green fields, waterfalls, river valleys and blanket bog. This is farming country, and still looks like it to a careless eye. But each day and for 40 years an endless succession of skip lorries carries medical waste, chemical waste, household waste into the hills and dumps it there. River valleys are filled, quarries are deepened. Rolling moors are bulldozed, hills chopped down to the height of city streets. Once noticed, the scale of devastation tears the heart and stops the breath. It runs down the streams; seeps through the bogs; blows downhill along the roads. It joins vandalism, graffitti and burnt out cars. Pollution breeds litter and casual neglect.
There was a time when there were few other ways to earn a living here. Now the profits are too high for many to stop. Some of them have been going so long, they have squatter's rights and retrospective planning permission. They are paid to solve problems; to take the cast off, outworn and dangerous that urban life has produced. In this, it is perhaps no different to any city landfill or waste treatment plant.
In any case, I am only a visitor here. I pick out the Peace Line from above, the city small and bright below. The sky races by, and the lake shore stretches, shining. I wonder, when pride is lost in the community, in the tribe, in the state, does pride in the land itself drain away? This is how it feels to me - the land beaten and torn, life itself shot down in punishment. Yet change comes. There is no Right to Roam in the province, but a great swathe of the Black Mountains is now open to the people of Belfast. Hardy volunteers spent the first winter pulling thousands of car tyres out of the frozen bog. Paths are built in gale force winds. This is a wild spot, with a strange kind of natural magic. Circled by storms in an endless sky, I can reach out and almost touch the city. This is neutral ground and a new perspective. Apparently, the slopes are full of orchids in the summer...it's a different world.
