Alphabet Angel
Alphabet Angel
The Alphabet Angel was created in 2004 through a community art project working with the sculptor Ross Wilson. The project involving seventeen young people as well as several older members of the community who spent several months looking at their cultural identity as expressed in their local tongue. At this time the Ulster-Scots heritage of the community had not been explored in any depth. Several leading authorities on the subject came to speak to the group including James Fenton whose poem is engraved in the pathway leading up to the figure. The sculpture became the first physical marker to the Ulster-Scots tongue in Europe, and as far as we know, the first lifesize bronze figure that celebrates the tongue in the world.
The bronze work reached a new level of quality and presentation for cultural community art in Northern Ireland. It is placed in the heart of the community where the tongue is still spoken and heard. Money from one of the funders, a local tourism development body was initially refused because the figure was not on the Main Street. The project team stuck to their principals and appealed the decision twice because the sculpture came from, represented and therefore belonged in the heart of the community where the tongue is rooted and the people who created it live. A pathway leading to the sculpture has a poem engraved into the stone. One unique aspect of this part of North Antrim is the local tongue which carries a mixture of Scots, English, French and Gaelic.