(Not) Clowney-ing Around

So far, I’ve tended to walk the rivers alone, or with my dog friend Barney. But there have been exceptions. Once we walked, as a family, in the Knock River’s stretch through Orangefield Park during one of the lockdowns. It was a patch of the river that was difficult to access (and has since been meticulously fenced off) faced on either bank with sheer concrete walls. Neighbours watched us suspiciously from windows; some came to peer in and scowl. The kids seemed to enjoy it, splashing along in their wellies. I felt uneasy. I am not sure what my wife felt. She never asked if we could do it again if that says anything… A few weeks back on my search for the Clowney – a river with two names: it is the Forth towards its source on Divis Mountain overlooking Belfast – I made another exception; I invited my friend Joe along. I had to invite Joe – he is a wordsmith (and then some) of impeccable dress and musical taste, but more importantly he lives on Clowney Street under which the eponymous river flows. Not far from Joe, it makes a brief appearance before disappearing again under the motorway to join the Blackstaff on the opposite side of the manmade gorge cynically named the Westlink.

As with most of the rivers in the west and centre of the city i.e., on the older Co. Antrim side, rather than the Co. Down side (the Lagan River dividing the two) the Forth/Clowney, for much of its course, has been culverted over and is not visible. I meet Joe on Clowney Street and he is raring to go. ‘Let’s find this ____ river!’ he booms as we head out his front door on our quest. The plan, on this occasion, is to walk upstream, through a broadly nationalist part of the city, to where the Clowney (which derives from cluaineach i.e., ‘water-meadowy’ in Irish) becomes the Forth in loyalist west Belfast. We first need to backtrack, however, to where the Clowney meets the Westlink, attempting to follow a thin blue line on a 2014 Rivers Agency flood map towards the motorway. I say ‘attempt’ as the river of course is running through underground channels that only periodically pay heed to the routes of the streets overhead. Is there anything to indicate that the Clowney runs under Clowney Street I wonder as we walk downriver – we agree that the street seems markedly wider than Amcomri Street and Beechmount Parade that both run parallel to it. We look for further clues and find them in streets with watery names like Islandbawn and Fallswater. This could be wishful thinking but the ‘Falls Road Stream’, a tributary of the Clowney, also flows underground near here, and our river is sometimes known as the Clowney Water. Not to mention Clonard further up the Falls Road which Ciaran Carson explains in The Star Factory comes ‘from the Irish cluain ard, ‘high water-meadow’’.

After finding ourselves trapped in cul-de-sacs, we opt to skirt around the front of Park Centre retail park. I have never been in here and later check out some online reviews. The shopping centre seems to have had its ups and downs, with a one-star review from a local guide five years ago reading: ‘Like a scene from one of those zombie movies from the 80s. Almost entirely deserted apart from a few who just keep coming here because they don’t know what else to do’. Recent reviews are more favourable, the general feeling being the centre has ‘its mojo back’ with one five-star review calling it the ‘Holy Grail of a store, well laid out, staff affable’. There is also much praise for the toilets. Joe tells me his dad once made him set up a stall here selling surplus medical equipment. It sounds like a pained affair so I decide not to press him on the subject for now. 

In a forgotten corner of the carpark, beyond the lads offering MOT washes, I notice the familiar infrastructure of the culvert entrance – a steep incline with steps framed by galvanised steel railings, gangways and chains, all enclosed in 10-ft fencing. Despite the heavy security, we are delighted by this first glimpse of the Clowney, just before it runs into darkness under the motorway and is the Clowney no more. It is wider, more seductive and significant than we imagined, a small meander of nature surrounded on all sides by concrete and steel. We head around the corner to the now empty ‘Broadway Towers’ site to get a better view.

 The Broadway Towers (christening areas in Belfast with the names of famous locations in the US is not new it would seem – see ‘The Hamptons’ or the attempt to rebrand the Cathedral Quarter as ‘Tribeca’) were originally built as homes for nurses working in the Royal Victoria Hospital. There is a charming RTÉ archive news reportfrom 1966 on the then brand new towers, describing them as ‘fully furnished with all modern conveniences’ and looking like ‘a luxury hotel’ with furniture that appears ‘quite expensive’. Another plus, according to one of the nurses interviewed, is that residents ‘have the freedom to come and go as they please, which contrasts with life in a nurses’ home where student nurses have to be in by 11 o’clock at night’. Give it a watch. The dilapidated towers have been lying empty now for almost ten years. According to an article in local news website Belfast Live, the owners, the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, recently defended this with a statement: ‘The Broadway Towers site continues to be operationally important for the Belfast Trust providing 327 much needed car parking spaces’… It is a week day but the carpark is pretty much deserted. Maybe no one wants to park beside a derelict tower block? There are gaps in a concrete wall that afford us another glimpse of the river, a sliver of bucolic Clowney. Close by, we discover the truncated stump of a bronze sculpture which has been mercilessly sawn to pieces. It might have once depicted a tree – it looks like a heart says Joe. It does look like a heart, the crudely sawn-off branches reminiscent of diagrams in school biology books, with their empty vena-cavas, pulmonary veins and arteries; clean, colour-coded and sliced in cross section, and not a drop of blood in sight. Later I try to find out more about the sculpture but cannot find any information. I contact artist and academic Una Walker, who is vastly knowledgeable on sculpture in Ireland but she, at the time of writing, is totally baffled. Joe and I follow the wall of the carpark around and catch another few sightings of the river but cannot see where it disappears again. Time to head upriver.

Returning to Clowney Street, we work our way upstream, still using the flood map to trace the river’s underground passage. We pass a community centre called the Blackie River in the Beechmount estate, before getting a bit lost. It is another clue. Some days later I end up trawling through 13 pages of a thread on a forum from 2009 with people reminiscing about playing in the river ‘Flush’ some 30, 40 and 50 years previously. Some contributors say that the Flush – yet another name for the Forth/Clowney – was known as the ‘Blackie’ when it reached Beechmount housing estate. Some claim it has been called the ‘Cotty’ since at least the 1980s. Several people reminisce about the Franklin Laundry that would dump water into the river, making it warm for paddling and accounting for the shifting colours of river on any given day. There is also much talk of meeting members of the opposite sex (and opposite side of the religious divide) for a ‘lumber’. Something else catches my attention: references to weeds called ‘Motherdies’. ‘The kids all said if you picked them your mother dies, mad or what, we were scared to go near them’ says ‘justluvbeingme’. ‘rose60’ describes them as ‘tiny wee flowers making up big white flat heads ... thick green stems ... grew quite large ... I would not touch one for love nor money’. I cannot help thinking that they are describing giant hogweed (see We Just Called It All Grass), a plant the sap of which is phototoxic i.e., it prevents the skin from being able to protect itself from sunlight, which leads to serious skin inflammation or even blindness. A folk tale fabricated to protect young children navigating the (literal) wastelands of youth. ‘I can touch them now my poor old mum is gone’ adds rose60.

Joe sherpas us out of Beechmount with the aid of Google maps and I figure out again where we are on my fuzzy paper map. Just as we think we are about to be treated to another view of the Forth-Clowney-Flush-Blackie-Cotty, the flood map – which admittedly is a good 10 years old – lets us down. Ambling up the Forfar Road we decide that scaling the gates into a new Belfast Met campus will be more effort than it is worth, the river has obviously been culverted in the meantime. Further up, just beyond the bend in the Springfield Road, there is a new piece of public art: a tall, silver and featureless figure, with long legs and bendy arms, carrying a child on their shoulders. I start thinking about the Slender Man meme that caused moral panic in 2014. But I suspect that is just me – a mind ruined by the internet. There is an information plaque near the base in Irish, English and Ulster Scots, this is an interface area after all. Someone has already tried to scratch out the Irish language text. This place…

I spot a culvert. ‘Over there, Joe!’. ‘How do you know?’. ‘I just know’, I say sagely (I am starting to show off now; now that I have someone to show off to). The culvert is inaccessible, but the river leads into it from an area that feels recently developed for the local community: tarmac paths, folksy wooden posts with wire fencing, with the more serious high mesh fencing beyond, and a definite river running alongside the tarmac path. We wade into the tall grass, horsetail, and ragwort for a better look: a swathe of that ubiquitous summer interloper Himalayan Balsam flanks a trickle of black water, slick with oily residue, red bricks worn river smooth, green and yellow shards of plastic sheeting poking out, and a traffic cone for good measure. All it needs now is a shopping trolley. It is a miserable affair and Joe is disappointed. I get the sense that the Clowney Street man is taking this personally and I get how he feels. The map shows a more significant river and I am finding it hard to believe this is it but… I guess this is it? We think we hear a more impressive sibilance up ahead, but it is just the wind stirring the sycamores. What an ignominious end to our river.

Decidedly deterred, we nonetheless head further along the path. Signifiers of this area as an interface begin to take physical form: there were gates at the entrance, and more gates towards the exit. There are opening and closing times, yes as with most city parks, but also like the gate on the peace wall we passed on the Springfield Road. In addition, more fencing runs to our right, parallel to the path, which Joe reckons marks the division between two West Belfast communities. Beyond, however, the landscape slopes downwards; there seems also to be a natural barrier – hang on, might this be the proper river? We obviously need to get down, but there does not seem to be any easy way of doing so from the park. We exit through the far end onto West Circular Road. It is July. Union Jacks are flying; we have definitely crossed an invisible border. There is a gap in a gate where tracks leading into a wasteland veer off in various directions back the way we came, but on the other side of the fence now, and the valley, in which there has to be the river.

One worn steep path leads us to the right and down and down, into the valley. We descend into the past, into entire childhoods. At the bottom I see a concrete block bracketed in tubular safety railings, like a viewing platform. Excitement builds. In an earlier post I questioned why anyone would walk for kilometres in search of a glimpse of a hidden river. I am starting to realise that this feeling is why. But what is this feeling?; this pit-of-the-stomach draw to places like this?

 We stand on the platform looking down at a sizeable river five metres below; it is more than two metres across. How could we have thought that earlier choked gully was our Clowney!? There is a grille under our feet – the concrete block is hollow it would seem. We clamber down towards the river bank, gripping some unchecked Japanese Knotweed for balance, and stand on the riverbank. Joe is bewitched by the place. Me too. I have that feeling I always get in places like this i.e., that they are not long for this world, that the next time I try to come here I may have trouble getting in. The river flows out of a huge concrete pipe, big enough to walk down, and continues on under arched branches and greenery. I know from experience that this pipe is going to haunt me – a dark tunnel I have no desire to go down but will not leave me be until I do. Places like this are red flags to local councils and government departments, places that invite ‘antisocial behaviour’. I need to get back here as soon as I can and somehow document what I find, do it properly, soak it up, get in the river and feel it, this true little patch of wilderness, or at least wildness. ‘This has always been here’, says Joe. ‘Yes’, I say, ‘it was here all along’. He is emotional. So am I, and I try to launch into some sort of soliloquy, fitting for the occasion: ‘They try to hide them and cover them up and forget about them. They build over them and change their courses but…’ I flail about searching for some metaphor to conclude, and pick the wrong one: ‘… they haven’t gone away, you know!’.