365 – A Nameless Intra-Irish Pene-Enclave

A pene-enclave is almost an enclave in the same way that a peninsula* almost is an island. But only on a strictly lexical level. If we descend from the abstraction of definition to particular examples, things get messy — in an almost clintonesque way: all depends on what your definition of almost is.

Most people will instinctively agree on what constitutes a peninsula: a piece of land almost completely surrounded by water, but for a narrow isthmus that connects it to the mainland. No isthmus, no peninsula.

You would expect the same of a pene-enclave, minus the water: it should also require a contiguous land corridor to its ‘mainland’. But most lists of pene-enclaves mention places that are reachable from their mainland across bodies of water (e.g. Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish holdings on Morocco’s North African coast). So: no isthmus, but still a pene-enclave.

How so?

There is some justification for this different, broader definition. A proper enclave needs to be cut off from its mainland. One could debate whether being accessible only via the sea or across a river counts as being “cut off” or not. If you define that ambiguity as the almost implied in the prefix, then yes, these Isolates-by-the-Sea are pene-enclaves.

One reason for embracing this ambiguity might be that requiring a narrow land corridor makes for an exceedingly short list of pene-enclaves. Of one, to be exact. The only international example of a pene-enclave springing to mind is Jungholz, which would be an Austrian enclave inside Germany, were it not connected to the Heimat via a single point — the summit of Mount Sorgschrofen.

A single point: that’s the narrowest possible isthmus. But when does an isthmus stop being narrow? When it does, there is no longer an isthmus, and therefore no longer a pene-enclave.

I never thought I would catch a bona fide pene-enclave in the wild, but then I came across this bizarre boundary (while detail-scanning the intra-Irish border on Google Maps, as one does in one’s spare time). I am sure nobody would dispute that this pene-enclave has a properly narrow isthmus. Judging by the map’s scale (in the bottom left corner), it can’t be much wider than 100m (app. 330 ft). The pene-enclave itself continues for several kms (or miles) in both length and breadth.

The area looks to be quite rural, and is dotted with typically Irish toponyms and the occasional bucolic English one (“Rabbit Island”). It is dissected by the N3 road from Monaghan to Cavan, both in the Republic of Ireland. The N3 becomes the A54 for the duration of its brief foray into Northern Ireland — actually, its two brief forays, thanks to the pene-enclave.

However, extra information-wise, this intra-Irish pene-enclave is frustratingly un-googleable; other than that it is located between County Monaghan (Ireland) and County Fermanagh (UK), there’s not really any information to be found. The aberration remains nameless, its raison d’etre a mystery. Suggestions for a name are welcome, as are clues to its origin.

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This map was culled from Google Maps. * the rather rare Latin prefix pene- is also used in ‘penultimate’, i.e. ‘almost the ultimate’, therefore ‘last but one’. But that doesn’t help either in figuring out the pronunciation of the full prefix in ‘pene-enclave’. Penny/pen-nay/pay-nee/pay-nay? Anyone?

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Update: Drummully Polyp, or Coleman’s Island

Thanks for all your comments to this post. How great it is to be able to post a mysterious map like this one and have the commenters fill in the blanks! For starters, the previously-unnamed entity now has not one, but two names. We know a bit more about the area’s historical circumstances, have an inkling of the local head-count (onehundred-ish, and falling) and someone’s even sent in a picture of the local parish church inside the pene-enclave.

“In south Fermanagy, the most obvious anomaly [in the Irish border] was the Drummully polyp, a Monaghan DED [District Electoral Division] ‘practically enclosed’ within the North. North and South interlocked like jigsaw pieces, and the Clones to Cavan railway crossed the Border six times in five miles.”

(extract from The Irish Border – History, Politics, Culture by Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort (eds.), Liverpool University Press, 1999)

 

“The soil is generally good, and there is no waste land, but abundance of bog and limestone; about 600 acres are under water. Among the seats are Cara, the residence of J. Hassard, Esq.; Lake View, of D. Smith, Esq.; and Farm Hill, of C. Crowe, Esq. The living is a rectory and vicarage, in the diocese of Clogher and patronage of the Bishop; on the demise of the incumbent of Currin, a considerable part of Drumkrin, which is now held with that parish, will be united to Drummully. The tithes amount to £19, and the glebe comprises 154 acres. The church is a small building. In the R. C. divisions it is the head of a district, including Drummully, Drumkrin, and Galloon, and has two chapels in the last-named parish : about 60 children are educated in a public and 100 in a private school.”

(extract from A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland by Samuel Lewis, 1837)

Many thanks to mollymooly for digging up these references and data. Drummully is the name of the local parish, that in 1837 had 667 inhabitants. In 2002, the Drummully DED (981 hectares) had 102 inhabitants; in 2006 this had decreased to 92. Gary McMurray (comment #44) posted a link to a picture of the parish church within the pene-enclave. 

The Drummully Polyp came up in a question to the Dail (Irish Parliament ) on 15 May 1980, about whether the helicopters the Irish Army had to use to fly its soldiers in to man checkpoints on a road that had no direct ground vehicle access from the rest of the Republic didn’t bear too much of a resemblance to British Army helicopters (which presumbably might confuse those with intent to attack British – or Irish – helicopters).

As to why it has the quirky shape it does, Paddy Matthews suggests that “presumably [the Drummully Polyp] would have been a near-enclave held by the McMahons (from whose territory County Monaghan was created) in the territory of the Maguires (which gave rise to County Fermanagh).”

Max, who has firsthand knowledge of intra-Irish border policing, has a different name for the area: “

When I had some responsibility for border policy in the 1980s this little bit of land was known by the Irish Army patrols as Coleman’s Island. It was regularly patrolled on foot by the Army because there was no way to access it by road. The border is rife with oddities; at several points it actually runs along the road, so that driving on the Northern side of the road you were in the UK and driving on the other side of the white line you were in Ireland. This wasn’t necessarily a trivial thing in the 1980s, when the British Government had made a lot of people living in Ireland the subject of so-called exclusion orders which meant that they could be arrested and imprisoned just for entering Northern Ireland. A number of people living in border counties had to adopt very circuitous routes to and from their regular destinations as a result.”Many of the commenters offered examples, or even whole lists of other pene-enclaves. Not so rare as I imagined, pene-enclaves are positively abundant if you include the subnational ones. See comments for suggestions. Some of the example mentioned (not necessarily pene-enclaves themselves) were mentioned earlier on this blog:

• Baarle (#52)
• Steinstücken (#151)
• Büsingen (#253)

As already mentioned in the post itself, the definition of what is a pene-exclave (and indeed a peninsula) hinges on how you define “almost” (as in, “almost an enclave” or “almost an island”), i.e. on the narrowness of the isthmus. But where, for example, is the isthmus of Florida, Christian quite rightly asks. And yet no one will dispute Florida is a peninsula.

The French, as Geiseric remarks, make a useful distinction, between

A word on the word “pene-enclave” itself: Greg suggested the prefix should be pronounced pen-nay (but warned against looking up the prefix pene- in Wikipedia, as this redirects to “penis”, picture and all). That link should not be a surprise, Jorge Rosa stated: “Just look at the evidence”, while Geiseric suggested the pronunciation pi-ney (as it derives from paene-), but also contracting the word to ‘penenclave’.

une péninsule (in general, any piece of land surrounded by water, attached to a larger piece of land, without the attachment needing to be narrow, i.e. la péninsule des Balkans) and une presqu’ile (where the attachment is noticeably to particularly narrow). In conclusion, as questions can be asked about the definition, spelling and pronunciation of the word pene-enclave, Aletheia Kallos (who qualifies the word as “ugly, confusing and unnecessary”) suggests a few alternatives: salient, proruption, panhandle and chersonese. To which might be added: strip – and of course polyp.

151- Exclaves of West Berlin (4): Steinstücken and Wüste Mark

Steinstücken is the southernmost part of the Berlin Ortsteil (borough) of Wannsee, almost adjacent to the UFA film studios. From east to west, it’s no more than 500 metres wide, north to south: 300 metres. About 200 people call Steinstücken home. Before 1972, it was completely isolated inside the territory of Potsdam, the capital of the neigbouring Land (state) of Brandenburg. This sleepy hamlet was a focal point of East-West tension, as it was one of the exclaves of West Berlin inside East Germany.

(for earlier references to Berlin exclaves: see #99 on Erlengrund and Fichtewiese, #102 on Laßzinswiesen and #114 on the three Böttcherberg exclaves)

The Steinstücken exclave dates from 1787, when farmers from Stolpe acquired 12 hectares of land outside of their town, and in 1817 set up a farming colony there. In 1898, Stolpe was incorporated into Wannsee, including the exclave of Steinstücken. The exclave situation persisted when Wannsee was incorporated into Greater Berlin in 1920: Steinstücken was now an exclave of Berlin itself, in the Potsdam suburb of Babelsberg.

Exclaves not being uncommon between mere communes, the situation remained irrelevant to daily life until after 1945. At the end of the Second World War, Berlin’s city limits became the boundaries of Zones of Occupation of the four powers (UK, US, France and Soviet Union). Steinstücken thus was part of the US Zone (of Berlin), and became an island in the Soviet Zone (of Eastern Germany).

This wasn’t a problem until 1951, when the East German government tried to annex Steinstücken. The Volkspolizei (‘People’s Police’) physcally occupied the area. The inhabitants objected, the US protested, and the annexation was reversed four days later. But since then, Steinstücken was surrounded by a pole fence, preventing the exclave-dwellers from passing freely to Babelsberg and Potsdam. The only access was the Bernhard-Beyer-Strasse to Kohlhasenbrück in West-Berlin. This forested street lay on East German soil, so driving to Berlin involved passing two border crossings.

In 1952, East Germany restricted all West Berliners’ acces to East Berlin only. Steinstücken’s inhabitants in theory no longer could visit their immediate surroundings, which were outside East Berlin. Road blocks were erected on the border between West Berlin and East Germany, also at Steinstücken. Entry to Steinstücken was possible only after reporting to police precinct 162 in Wannsee.

Especially after the building of the Berlin Wall (1961), Steinstücken became a popular target for East German Fluchtwilliger (‘those willing to flee’), because the only real barrier was constituted by chevaux de frise – although it’s unclear to me where those who fled into the exclave could go from there, as access to West Berlin was controlled by East German border guards.

And yet, it happened, as after more than 20 those border guards ’switched sides’ at Steinstücken, the GDR government constructed a separate wall around the exclave, making the border here equally impenetrable as at the ‘proper’ Berlin Wall.

In 1961, the Americans established a symbolic military outpost at Steinstücken consisting of three soldiers, choppering in and out of the exclave. A Hubschrauber-Denkmal (‘Helicopter Memorial’) erected in 1976 commemorates this air bridge. This situation was resolved with the exchange of territories between West and East Germany of 1972, establishing a corridor of 100 metres wide and 1,2 km long between Steinstücken and Kohlhasenbrück, in West Berlin. This corridor corresponded with the Bernhard-Beyer-Strasse. Steinstücken was no longer an exclave, and a steady stream of tourists towards the cartographic anomaly ensued. Bus line 118 connected Steinstücken to West Berlin, and water and power could now be derived from West Berlin.

One of Steinstücken’s inhabitants was a farmer who owned several fields in GDR territory. He received permission from the East German authorities to drive his tractor on the Autobahn towards his fields, which also included pastures in the Wüste Mark, another western ‘island’ in the communist ’sea’; this uninhabited farmland became East German in an exchange of territories in 1988.

The border between Berlin and Potsdam lost its geopolitical significance the year after, when the Berlin Wall fell. German reunification occurred in 1990, but at Steinstücken the border still follows the old pattern, including the Cold War corridor of 1972.

This 1950 map, showing Steinstücken and the Wüste Mark to the east, was found here, at this page, collecting maps and information about West Berlin’s exclaves. The later corridor linking Steinstücken to West Berlin runs along the railway line.

114 – Exclaves of West Berlin (3): the Böttcherberg Troika

 

The Berlin neighbourhood of Wannsee is situated on an island cut off from the mainland by a number of lakes and canals. Before the unification of both Germanys, the island was the southwesternmost part of West Berlin. But two salients of Potsdam (then East Germany) protrude onto the island from the south, bringing the heavily guarded East-West border onto the Wannsee island.

This map, an excerpt from a cadastral map of Berlin from 1953, shows the western protrusion and within that salient, three very small, oblong strips of land that belonged to West Berlin. These are the three Böttcherberg enclaves, sometimes counted together as one because of their small size (0,30 hectares in all), thus accounting for the difference in the number of former West Berliner enclaves in East Germany, some sources counting 10, others 12. Even when added up, the Böttcherberg troika have the smallest surface of them all. Earlier postings explain a bit about the peculiarities of the exclaves Erlengrund and Fichtewiese (#99) and Laßzinswiesen (#102).

Not much background information is to be found about the Böttcherberg exclaves, other than that all three probably were uninhabited, and that the northern one included part of a graveyard. The author of this intriguing website about the Berlin exclaves visited the site of the Böttcherberg troika, concluding that “there must not have been much room for a no-man’s land between Böttcherberg SW and West Berlin, and even less so between Böttcherberg N and West Berlin. Remaining debris suggested that at least Böttcherberg N was part of the no-man’s land prior to 1989, but it should be really interesting to know if DDR authorities at any time respected the status of any of the Böttcherberg exclaves.”

The only comment I can add to that are that this troika is situated in an historically very interesting neighbourhood. 

• The Wannsee area is famous as a holiday and sunbathing locale, and infamous as the place where in January 1942, senior Nazis met to plan the Endlösung (the ‘Final Solution’) for exterminating Europe’s Jews.

• Wannsee is also the place where in November 1811, the German romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist first shot and killed Henriette Vogel and then himself in a murder-suicide pact.

• Just to the south of both Potsdamer salients, across the Glienicker Brücke, lies the Potsdam district of Babelsberg, pre-World War II Germany’s equivalent to London’s Ealing Studios or
  Rome’s Cinecittà, and at present again a centre of German filmmaking.

• The Glienicker Bridge itself was used three times to exchange captured agents between East and West, which is how it earned its nickname as ‘Bridge of Spies’. In 1962, Gary Powers, the U2 pilot shot down over the USSR in 1960, was exchanged for a Russian colonel. In 1985, 23 American agents held in Eastern Europe were exchanged for 4 Soviet agents in the West. And in 1986, Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky (currently the Israeli politician Nathan Sharansky) and three others were traded for 5 Soviet agents.

• On the former East German side of the Glienicker Bridge, lies the small settlement of Steinstücken, the largest of West Berlin’s exclaves.

102 – Exclaves of West Berlin (2): Laßzinswiesen

Not much info on this, the third (*) of former West Berlin’s ten tiny enclaves within former East Germany. This website on Berlin exclaves merely mentions that Laßzinswiesen “was an exclave just north of Laßzinssee, only tens of meters from West-Berlin but completely unaccessible from the West.” As is shown on this Soviet map. The text inside the exclave contains the words ‘perechod’ (‘access’) and ‘granitsa’ (‘border’), but that’s where my acquaintance with Russian ends. Any help with the translation would be very welcome.

Other sources list Lasszinswiesen as having an area of 13,49 hectares, making it the third largest of West Berlin’s exclaves. For a complete list of the exclaves and their sizes, go here. All territorial anomalies between West Berlin and East Germany (except West Berlin – or East Germany – itself) were resolved in three stages of Gebietsaustausch (exchange of territory) in 1971, 1974 and 1988. The Wall fell just a year after the last exchange.

(*): See post #99 for a map and some information on Erlengrund and Fichtewiese, the first two exclaves mentioned on this blog.

99 – Exclaves of West Berlin (1): Erlengrund and Fichtewiese

On August 13, 1961, the East German authorities erected a physical barrier in Berlin to prevent their citizens from ‘voting with their’ feet – i.e. fleeing to West Germany. This barrier, consisting of fences, minefields and/or huge blocks of concrete, eventually ran along the entire Deutsch-Deutsche Grenze (the ‘German-German border’), but was particularly poignant in Berlin, where it visibly dissected contiguous city neighbourhoods.

The barrier became known as the Berlin Wall, completely isolating the ‘capitalist island’ of West Berlin by means of a Todesstreifen – literally a ‘death-strip’. This militarized border with impassable fortifications and border guards with orders to shoot to kill is gone now. A decade and a half after the reunification of Germany, it’s hard to imagine this was once a fact of life in one of the major capitals of Europe (and a very lethal one at that).

And yet it gets even more absurd: the pre-war city of Berlin owned a number of exclaves outside its city limits, and these were included in the post-war deal that divided Berlin into four zones of occupation (French, American, British and Soviet), later into two administrative units (the Soviet zone became the capital of East Germany, the other three zones coalesced into ‘West-Berlin’, which was connected to West-Germany by three Autobahn corridors). The ‘hardening’ of the inner German borders in August 1961 gave these exclaves (10 ‘western’ exclaves in East-Germany, but also 3 ‘eastern’ exclaves in West-Berlin) extra significance – and potential to serve as flash-points of conflict.

This map shows two of the 10 West-Berlin enclaves in East Germany: Erlengrund (literally ‘Alderground’) and Fichtewiese (‘Spruce Meadow’). They were located very close to the border of West-Berlin, just north of Spandau Forest. Both enclaves were used by (western) garden societies, whose members farmed small parcels within the enclaves, sometimes owning small cottages within the grounds themselves. Access was limited to certain ‘visiting hours’, and each time the owners had to pass through a gate in the Berlin Wall, continue over a metre-wide path through no-man’s land, pass an access-permit control-post and continue into one of both enclaves.

I will be posting more about these and other former ‘capitalist’ and ‘communist’ enclaves in and around Berlin. This map was taken from a fascinating website called Berlin Exclaves (http://berlin.enclaves.org).