False Lankum
ROUGH TRADE
9/10
AMONG these little islands to the northwest of the European mainland, the sea has always claimed a large slice of national mythologies. For hundreds of years England has brandished its thalassic geography as a treatise of power: the scepter’d isle that never never shall be enslaved.
But as England now cheerfully hoists itself by its own petard, disrespecting its own maritime coastline by defiling it with its own internal bowel movements, the sea arguably looms even larger in Ireland’s national story. From the arrival of St Patrick over the waves to Cromwell’s invasion across the waters; the waves of 19th-century emigration; arguably the nation’s greatest literary creation named for Ulysses,
