Joseph Heffernan

Joseph Heffernan is a second year MA Architecture student, graduating from Oxford Brookes University and working as an Architectural Assistant at Karakusevic Carson Architects. Joseph's practice is explored through drawing as a medium that investigates space and peoples relationship to it.

Last year, Joseph was in ADS 0, exploring the possibilities of co-living self builds within an office tower environment. The project re-imagined Permitted Development laws that allow developers to profit from transforming unappreciated office space into housing while skimming over planning permission, allowing for inadequate living conditions to be thrust upon people with little option but to inhabit. The project was explained through a series of drawings narrating the process of transforming an office space into a self build commune for young people, providing construction skills and precious autonomy in London. The project was nominated for the RIBA London West Student award.

This year Joseph has explored the exhaustion of turf in rural Ireland, focusing on the hyper industrialised land and the productivity of a vital eco-system.

Useless Terrain - Waiting, Watching, Drawing

Useless terrain propagates a holistic restoration project upon the Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog in County Westmeath, designing a walkway that determines a 10,000 year journey around the bog, as it ever so slowly repairs itself from violent colonial and industrial scarring. The project is told through a conceptual drawing practice that waits, watches and records the return of this vital ecosystem. The consistent drawing process navigates the unrelenting passing of time and the steady moving and breathing of the bog, while encompassing a 10 km boardwalk that determines a new relationship and ritual the people have with the terrain. The walkway will dam the bog, keeping it waterlogged for the restoration to flourish. In effect plugging the indents and scars left by hyper industrialisation and extraction from the land.

The project draws attention to the time difference the bog adheres to, and with it, its mystery and Gothic characterisation; illustrating the bog’s relevance in ancient folklore, colonial history, storytelling and the environment. The relentless drawing of the terrain is charged by the reading of Waiting for Godot, as an endless, enduring practice which aims to characterize the eternal monotony of the bogs restoration. Capturing the slow perpetual motion of the bog and its restoration through the projects proposal, as viewed from the walkway over the course of the 10,000 years it takes for the bog to be repaired.

Every hectare of drained peatland emits 2 tonnes of carbon per annum; known peatlands only cover about 3% of the world’s land surface, but store at least twice as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests. It is estimated 100,000 households in Ireland; many in old, draughty dwellings, use turf for heating. Cutting turf for fuel has been practiced for centuries, communities helped one another cut turf, competed for the best sods, and established a strong cultural identity through turf cutting. The project proposes a new form of cultural tradition, one that provides communal care for the local ecosystem.

The British colonial attitude to the Boglands viewed the terrain as useless, and needed draining to convert the bog into arable land, monetising the land and giving it “purpose”. The English saw Ireland as ‘a land of war’, inhabited by a savage people, ‘the wild Irish’ who lived in bogs and mountains. The draining of the bogs in the eyes of the English remedied the land, and offered a civilising impression on a useless land and savage peoples.

Exploring how the terrain has been prescribed as “useless” has been the core of my reading of the bog, as the hyper industrialisation of the land for fuel, presented a “use” for the land, its properties that had been ignored by so explicitly by the British jurisdiction, who only campaigned for the land to be converted into arable farm pasture. The reactionary industrialisation meant Ireland could be self sufficient, no longer reliant on British coal.

Bog time has also been identified as an crucial theme to the project, waiting for the bogs restoration will take thousands of years. The waiting process will seem fruitless for many lifetimes. The walkway is in a constant state of repair, giving parallel to the perpetual care needed to restore the bog. The drawing process works in a similar way, to identify this perpetual care and attention to this vital ecosystem.

A Country Road, A Tree, Evening – Walking in a barren wet terrain, a birch walkway stretches out in front of us. The air is humid, to the left and right of the path is a blanket of rich green moss and speckled with yellows and purples.

The restoration of the Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry bog will take 10,000 years, this slow mending process stretches over many lifetimes, a scale that is difficult to comprehend in human years. Signs of restoration are recorded by the revitalised wilderness of the bog and the waterlogged health of the terrain.

This land used to look very different, 20 years ago, the terrain was dryer, darker, engraved by heavy machinery, exhausted

Our path forks, venturing into two unknowns, one path is more travelled than the other. The blanket of raised bogland stretches out to the horizon.

The land changes, more alive in the next decade, the pathway vanishes into tall grasses and clumps of mosses and small bushes.

The walkway changes again, straying into the bog, signs of previously restored drains blocked by a plastic dam, holding a stream of water that veers off into the wetland.

Now entirely submerged in the bog, as if we have sunk into a new world, dark wet and humid peat rises up above us with only the skylight above to illuminate the path.

The entire site covers 249 hectares of raised bog, circumnavigated by a 10 kilometre walkway. The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry bog is the largest of the raised bogs near Moate, Co Westmeath, a place my family emigrated from, returning to a site worked on, lived on, respected and feared by my ancestors.

Back into the endless field of peatland, signs of pooling water encroach on the path. The walkway is raised from the ground level, giving us an elevated view of the bog, joining the bog again in a mossy, healthy environment.

Birch is one of the few trees that can withstand the harsh conditions of the bog, growing on the peripheries of the site, the wood is used in constructing the walkway, and farmed to maintain the future of the walkway.

Ireland was once a heavily forested Island, with large oak, beach and alder trees populating much of the country. The deforestation campaign instigated by the British to convert the island into a fruitful farm land changed the Irish ecosystem forever. A lot of the woods harvested from Ireland were used for ship building to add to British fleets.

The British colonial attitude to the Boglands viewed the terrain as useless, and needing draining to convert the bog into arable land, monetising the land and giving it “purpose”. The English saw Ireland as ‘a land of war’, inhabited by a rude and savage people ‘the wild Irish’, who lived in bogs and mountains. The draining of the bogs in the eyes of the English remedied the land, and offered a civilising impression on a useless land and savage peoples.

Burn everything English but its coal. Ireland had its own fuel source. Bord Na Mona, a semi state semi private organisation, effectively became the national grid harvested turf from the boglands on an industrial scale. This industrialisation left violent scars in the land. After a century of destructive hyper industrialisation that has diminished an estimated 99% of Ireland’s raised bogs.

Every hectare of drained peatland emits 2 tonnes of carbon per annum; known peatlands only cover about 3% of the world’s land surface, but store at least twice as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests. As of 2020, turf cutting has ended, it has fuelled a tense narrative of urban elites versus rural poor. Bord na Mona have insisted on planting wind farms on bogs, a green washing resolution that further destroys boglands when erected. The bog demands a minimal intervention that restores the land.

The bog has been carved up by heavy machinery by Bord na Mona, harvesting turf to fuel the country. The bog surface left behind from the industrial extraction outlines huge dents and craters with scorched terrain on the fringes of the site.

The industrial scale extraction leaves behind a moon like environment. The 10,000 years of restoration it will take to recondition the bog is set in motion by the re wilding and saturation.

Raised bogs are naturally ballooned, tallest in its centre, to drain the site, lanes are dug on the edges of the area, deflating the site, in order to harvest turf from a dry bog. The restoration process requires these drains to be plugged with dams.

The dams not only hold water in the bog but also direct water towards the centre of the site. This decaying process can be monitored and repaired by turf cutters.

The walkway is supported by the bog dams where the route journeys over the open drains in the Ballynagrenia bog, the north fragment of the site. The walkway compresses the bog dams, we travel over a sinking structure, absorbed by the waterlogged peatland.

The walkway peels off into a vast pool of water, 1000 years in the future, birch trees grow freely in the green, mossy wetland. A healthier fen like environment, with herons and otters return to the bog. Dragonflies hover above the humid pool preying on frog spawn that clump on the surface, in reeds and tall grasses.

Cutting turf for fuel has been practiced for centuries, communities helped one another cut turf, competed for the best sods, and established a strong cultural identity through turf cutting. Irish people survived for centuries by draining bogs and using peat as fuel.

Storytelling by a blazing fire embodied the national identity. There is a lot of emotional attachment to turf burning. We have to recognise the damage far exceeds the emotional nostalgia.

During the famine, hundreds of thousands of Irish were employed by the government to construct purposeless projects.

They built roads that had no destination, erected estate walls, built piers in the middle of bogs, and constructed fantastical follies in the grounds of the elite. These senseless constructions tasks epitomise the colonial perception of the Irish as useless, ever more imposing uselessness to define the land.

Back in the 21st Century, the bogs health appears to be wetter and healthier, a lapwing wades through a small puddle of water that meets the walkway, moss slowly creeps onto the wooden structure and grass grows through the crevices in the boardwalk.

A route vanishes into a singular hazel wall with a viewing window stretching the length of the wall, framing the bog, watching, waiting.

A Turf cutter out on his own, constructs a walkway tread by tread, as his forefathers have done before him, now entirely waterlogged, with a few peaks of bog and reeds emerging out of the water. The once exhausted terrain has emerged as a wet, healthy fen.

Ghostly bog bodies, buried and pickled deep in the bog that have been walked over for centuries. The terrain is a storing place of life, mystery and chemical change, preserver of ancient history. The bog has been used as a burial site for millennia, with many sacrificial burials being trapped between two worlds, preserved and pickled in the acidic terrain.

A Country Road, A Tree, Evening – We follow the path ahead of us stretching off in to the distance, with no end in sight. Lost, waiting, watching.

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420mm x 297mm

Joseph Heffernan

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Royal College of Art