Not Finding the Farset

I told someone recently that I was writing about the rivers of Belfast and they responded with a question – ‘you mean the Lagan?’ Maybe it was to be expected; they, like me, are a blow-in, and were not aware of the likes of the Blackstaff, the Colin, the Connswater, Ligoniel, Milewater or the Forth (in loyalist areas) which becomes the Clowney (in nationalist areas), or the Farset. I mean why would they? And why do I for that matter? I’ll park that question for the moment. Maybe when I finish this series of blogposts, I’ll have a better idea…

The Farset is, of course, the river that gives Belfast its name; ‘Belfast’ being an anglicisation of the Irish Béal Feirste. Originally, the Farset was more important than the Lagan which was, at that time, long before the Long Bridge, and longer before the Lagan Weir, still tidal and had a habit of silting up. Incidentally, the Lagan still needs to be dredged every 10 or 15 years – in 2020, for example, 55,000 m3 of silt was removed and dumped somewhere in the Irish sea, and 250 tonnes of  ‘manmade rubbish including shopping trolleys, traffic cones and bikes’ was taken to ‘disposal sites’. Bet you didn’t know that.

I’ll forever link the Farset with the recently-departed and much-missed poet Ciaran Carson. Gazing into it as a child, into the river’s ‘dark exhausted water’ somewhere at the bottom of Waterville St, Carson saw ‘a bottomless bucket. The undercarriage of a pram. A rusted spring mattress’. Béal Feirste he tells us, in a short prose piece entitled ‘Farset’ (in his collection Belfast Confetti) means the mouth of the (river) Farset. But Carson goes much further. Feirste comes from fearsad, a sandbank. However, the word can also refer to ‘a shaft; a spindle; the ulna of the arm; a club; the spindle of an axle […] a deep narrow channel on the strand at low tide; a pit or pool of water; a verse, a poem’, a wallet, an axis, etc., etc. He teases out the word’s multiple meanings. He renatures Farset, reducing it to a semantic puddle. He also quotes Ward, Lock & Co.’s Guide to Northern Ireland which pokes fun at Belfast’s civic coat of arms, specifically its bell – a ship’s bell we are told – that is a ‘feeble pun’ on the ‘Bel-’ in Belfast. I’m relieved the crest’s designer did not attempt to apply the same graphic punning with the second syllable – adding perhaps cartoon speed lines on either side of the bell to indicate rapid tolling.

The thing about the Farset today is that it is largely invisible, its original course through the city centre having long been culverted, even in Carson’s early years. Covered over in fact throughout the 18th century, its course still runs under High Street, accounting for the unusual width of that street and its slight curve, before unceremoniously plopping into the Lagan via an unmarked arched opening in the quay walls.

One evening, I find I have a small window where I can go exploring the Farset and set off with a blog post I find online entitled ‘Finding the Farset’ by way of a guide. It is not before several hours of walking, without so much as a glimpse of running water, that I realise I’ve done insufficient research. Perhaps it would have been worth even reading the first line of the post, I later reflect, which reads ‘’Finding the Farset’ isn’t really a fair title as the majority of the river is underground’. Nostalgia had gripped me in the form of memories of wandering around Europe in the late 90s with Lonely Planet guides to various countries (they always had the best self-guided walks) that led me to things like a John Lennon wall in Prague, a Frank Zappa monument in Vilnius, and Jeanneke, the statue of a peeing girl in Brussels. It’ll be fine, I think. However, this is not one of those guided walks – it assumes familiarity with lesser-frequented parts of the city, it jumps from one stage to the next without directions, and is filled with digressions on buildings of interest (which I admittedly enjoy).

I drive – unquestioningly – to a carpark near Governors Bridge, almost 10km from where I’ve heard the source of the Farset is located (on Squire’s Hill). I don’t read the line in the text I’ve chosen to follow, which states: ‘Looking for the Farset one wouldn’t really start at Governors Bridge, but it has a car park and the Lagan is the final destination of the Farset.’ At this point, if I’d bothered to read the article properly, alarm bells might have started to toll rapidly.

I park near the bridge and begin walking up Stranmillis Road. The walk takes in Riddell Hall, the Ulster Museum and Botanic Gardens, passing an ancient graveyard that I’ve always meant to visit. I try to remember the name of it before I get there, without resorting to my phone, and come up with ‘Bishop’s Finger’. It’s called ‘Friars Bush’... I stop for a moment to take in the bizarre mish-mash of styles and periods that is Elmwood Hall, its bell tower like some ornate chess piece. I pass some freshly-painted bollards that feature another element from that coat of arms – a prancing seahorse, or perhaps more correctly, in the arcane language of heraldry, a ‘hippocampus’, a chimera with the upper body of a horse and the lower body of a fish.

Further on, I pass Louise Walsh’s ‘Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker’ which stands just outside the grandiosely-titled ‘Great Northern Mall’, the entrance to the Europa Bus Station. It’s a subtly provocative and humorous sculpture depicting two sturdy women (initially commissioned to acknowledge nearby Amelia Street’s history as a red-light district) with symbols of domestic work embedded on its surfaces. Items such as colanders, scouring brushes, pacifiers, a shopping basket, clothes pegs, balls of wool, combs, a telephone, as well as newspaper clippings, all form part of the sculpture. The work had a fraught history, involving several members of the Paisley family, and was almost never completed. I recently recorded an interview with Louise for a video piece I was making on Carlisle Memorial Church. She worked there during the winter of 1987 despite all the odds of its troubled location, pigeons repeatedly crapping on her drawings, and the penetrating cold. But that’s another story.

Skirting around the rear of the Grand Opera House, I reach the back of the Belfast Academical Institution, or ‘Inst’ as it is known locally, to Christchurch (now a library and IT centre). Through the railings I see another seahorse. This one is metallic, patchwork and blind, and really is a seahorse, rather than a sea horse. A small plaque at the base probably offers some words of explanation for the presence of a seahorse sculpture but it is facing away from me and I cannot read it. A former Inst graduate gets in touch to tell me about a building known on campus as the RAF Hut which was built directly over the Farset, the construction costs of which escalated significantly due to the complications of the water course under the site. In a pub a few days later, a different former student tells me that the seahorse sculpture is there because the aquatic creature is one of the few examples where the male gets pregnant and gives birth. After briefly pondering the symbolism of this in an all-boys’ school I decide he has dredged up a seahorse fact and applied it to the milky-eyed sculpture, rather than providing me with its actual raison d’être. My blogger guide offers some words of, I decide, consolation: ‘this Seahorse is located to the rear of Christchurch within Inst and starts to show that we are seeing the links with the maritime history based around the Farset’. Ding-a-ling.

I press on, to stage 18 of the walk, ‘Westlink to Falls’, over a caged-in bridge I recognise from a scene in locally-filmed police series Blue Lights. Reaching the other side, I have a conversation about lurchers with a guy on a bike in a housing estate beside Divis Tower. I often imagine myself looking very suspicious on these investigative river walks, so the dog is a good prop – he also seems to be enjoying himself immensely. I walk around St Peter’s Cathedral (stage 19) – another strong Carson axis. I recall an extended flight of fancy, in his uncategorisable work The Star Factory, where he envisages a myriad of buildings (Laredo saloon, Glasgow tenement, Venetian palazzo, Amsterdam tall house, Warsaw synagogue, Kyoto temple, etc.) surrounding a fantastical piazza in front of the twin-spired building. It inspired the piece pictured below.

Stage 20 discusses Divis Tower Block. Stage 21, however, Townsend Street, finishes me off. The entry for this section is copied primarily from an article in the Belfast Telegraph – an evocative piece from an uncredited author that follows the river from its source to John Kindness’s sculpture ‘the Big Fish’ on the banks of the Lagan. I feel, after 90 or so minutes of walking, that I’m about to be treated to a view of the Farset. However, the piece directs me to a spot, which is not part of the guided route, ‘just above the Horseshoe Bend, where the Crumlin Road turns into Ballyutoag Road’, a good 40-minute walk from here towards the Belfast Hills. I accept that I’m not going to see the Farset today, and abandon the guide and head into the city down North Street, Bridge Street and High Street, brooding over how long it is going to take me to walk back to the car.

I’m feeling pissed off with myself now and the cityscape indulges me, moulding itself to my mood. I’m now in the Laganside area, a place with great potential but one I find intensely irritating – red-and-white warning signs have been attached seemingly everywhere: no drinking, no cycling on ramp, no climbing, etc. And then there is the street furniture: benches with periodic metal spurs on which no one ever sits, because they’re not actually seats but rather hostile street furniture designed to halt cyclists, skateboarders and homeless people. The Wikipedia entry for hostile architecture explains the term with unabashed directness – I can almost imagine the words coming out of the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg’s ventriloquist doll mouth: ‘Hostile architecture[a] is an urban-design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide behaviour. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others, such as youth, poor people, and homeless people, by restricting the physical behaviours they can engage in.’ Emphasis my own.

The area is windswept and abandoned. A man cycles past me very slowly, looking like an escapee from a Béla Tarr film. He looks miserable, draped over the bike and moving as if through tar itself. Then I glimpse a reflection of myself – a potato man on stick legs scowling at inanimate objects – and realise I might as well be in the same Béla Tarr nightmare. I pass the Waterfront, the ‘iconic’ building by the water which was then obscured inexplicably by an extension, removing it from the water’s front; an extension in which I have no idea what  happens, nothing I suspect. Two dried up oblong patches of sandy earth narrow the available space for cyclists, possibly planted at one stage, now barren – I bet they looked great in the architectural maquette.

I pass the burned remains of a barge that burst into flames at 3 o’clock in the morning in early April. Then Waterfront Plaza – a massive showy, white and black, steel and glass pile on the river’s edge – 135,000 ft2 of ex-PWC office space, once offered to my studio group as a possible meantime building some 18 months ago, and still lying empty. Then there’s Plastik – a former nightclub which also burst into flames. It has a wonderful location, right on the river, but has been closed for almost ten years. Get your shit together Belfast, I think.

Another dog conversation – sometimes it’s simpler to answer ‘yes, he is an Irish wolfhound’ instead of entering into a discussion on lurchers, Bedlingtons, and Irish Wheatens, but whenever I do that, I feel guilty. I do the former, and I feel guilty. I cut across the Albert Bridge to the embankment on the other side, thankful that while the starling murmuration has not yet returned to its full glory after the adjustment of new brighter LED lights under the bridge, it at least has not gone for good. Further along, an information post explains some of the local flora and fauna in the area. I notice that someone really has it in for the ‘Lesser Black-Backed Gull’ – the image of the ‘handsome gull’ in flight has been repeatedly struck with a blunt object, cracking the surface to expose the now rusted metal beneath. And then I have a flashback to when I cycled past this very spot some years previously, pedalling at full pelt, racing to collect children from school. I was running late and I assumed the pigeon would move – I mean they usually do, right? This one didn’t. I remember shouting ‘no! no!’ after the impact, and chanced a glance back over my shoulder to see a what looked like the contents of a pillow scattered across the footpath. Then an image I think David Lynch would be proud of – the macabre Spokey Dokey of a single white feather spinning round and round on my front wheel. ‘We had a deal’ my friend shouted at me when I explained to her what had happened.

Time to call it a day I reckon and I trek back to Governor’s Bridge, the place where ‘one wouldn’t really start [if] looking for the Farset’.  

To be continued…

Notes:

I have some fun with the blog post I used as a guide for this Farset walk, mostly poking fun at myself for not reading its premise properly before setting out. It is actually a fascinating walk that tracks (after a while!) above ground, the path of the river below ground and led me into one or two pockets of the city I had never been in, despite living here for 12 years. A blow-in.