Involving Community in Deep Mapping

Members of the community contributing to a mapping exercise in Ionaid Pobail an Mhám

Deep Mapping is the gathering of local knowledge, values, perceptions and visions and including those as valuable layers to develop a more complete picture of a place. Hometree has begun this process in two communities recently.

As part of its Wild Atlantic Rainforest Project, Hometree now owns land in various places in the west of Ireland. While our main intention for these lands is to support their regeneration for biodiversity, we also want to embed Hometree within the surrounding communities as neighbours. We believe fully in the power of community and in the importance of local knowledge, reciprocity, gathering, sharing, and knowledge exchange. As part of projects that also established ecological baselines for our sites in Connemara and in Sligo, we began a process of deep community engagement that will inform our plans and future actions on these sites.

A map of the Mám valley with stickers placed by community members indicating placenames, stories or interesting information.

Deep mapping is an approach to understanding the layered meanings, memories, and relationships that constitute place. Unlike conventional mapping, which focuses primarily on physical geography and infrastructure, deep mapping seeks to capture the richness of human experience, ecological relationships, cultural heritage, and community knowledge that make a place distinctive. It is an inherently collaborative process that brings together diverse perspectives and forms of knowledge - from scientific data to oral histories, from place/field names to personal memories, from ecological surveys to traditional land management practices.

Through the rich information that was shared during the deep mapping process, we are better able to understand local attitudes to trees and conservation. We have a better insight into the shape of each community and the strength and vibrancy of those communities in spite of (or maybe because of) the many challenges they face. It was such a pleasure to learn that in Mám they have a separate ‘neighbour’s night’ before Christmas to gather and catch up before the place is inundated with outside visitors and to hear about the informal busses that used to run around Gleneaskey before it was common for people to have cars. Hearing stories from the past in both localities helps us to imagine the places as they once were, even in the recent past when the Quiet Man was being filmed, when hedge schools were set up in specific places where the Black and Tans would be seen from a safe distance, and when turf cutting was a source of decent income. We are so grateful to those people in each area who shared their stories and memories with us.

It is also really important for our future work to hear about first hand accounts of animals and habitats that are now locally extinct but that maybe we can encourage to return, and to learn of other environmental initiatives in the locality who are already working hard for the benefit of the local wildlife.

The act of sharing stories and knowledge also provided a reason to gather on winter evenings.

In Mám we were fortunate to have had our Dinnseanchas artist, Peadar-Tom Mercier already active in the area. He had already established strong community connections and based on his work we knew that there was a local appetite to gather and store place names locally. Building on his work within Dinnseanchas, we arranged workshops in the local community centre and invited people to come and share their place names with us. The enthusiasm was heartwarming and we really enjoyed hearing the banter and stories emerge from the local farming community. This is a community that values its local lore and even the younger generations had stories to tell. Michael Gibbons, a knowledgeable historian also attended.

In Sligo, Hometree has had less time to establish itself within the community so the approach built on contacts that our Community Engagement Officer, Séamus Ó Riain, had made and networks that our collaborators, Heather Griffin and Patrick Mulvihill, were able to tap into. They focussed on carrying out one-to-one engagements over the phone and in person to build up a more general portrait of the locality rather than a detailed map like in Mám.

'A 3D cross-section of a part of the Mám valley including landmarks and placenames shared during the deep mapping workshops.

This combination of ecology and community is central to Hometree’s values but combining them with a view to creating management plans at sites away from our HQ in Ennistymon was new for the charity. We are a landscape restoration charity and are very aware that no landscape in Ireland is separate from its human inhabitants. It is clear that we will achieve little if we imagine ourselves to be somehow distinct from our neighbours and wider communities. Through the work in Sligo and Galway, we have now tested two approaches that we will continue to develop in future projects and activities.

The full project report documents can be downloaded using the links below.

This work was carried out in collaboration with Studio Saol and Amicita with funding from the National Parks and Wildlife Service’s Peatland and Natura 2000 Community Engagement Fund.