Narrating a national space

Recent approaches to landscape and identity have attended to the movement of people in both space and time as a means through which landscapes are personalised and identities created. This has facilitated a move away from a perspective that emphasises fixity and rootedness in the creation of identity, belonging and place and moves towards an approach informed by a focus on narrative and place. This paper develops the intersection of narrative, place and identity in relation to a ‘national space’. Drawing on an ethnography of a park in Dublin, ideas of national identity and space, with particular reference to cultural and material artefacts, are explored. This relationship is discussed through recourse to two important events in the park and the things they have left behind in the landscape.