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Five human figures constructed in steel, (more than 20 feet tall) stand near the border between Strabane, in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland and Lifford, in County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland.
They were Designed by Maurice Harron, and are affectionately known locally as "The Tinneys". He was commissioned to create them as a "Millennium Project", by the "Strabane Lifford Development Commission" supported by several local and national, community and arts organisations.
They are located on the site of a former British army military checkpoint on the border that partitions Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The VR opens looking at the two dancers reaching out to each other, the road to Derry behind and between them. (There is a hot spot there on the VR that takes you to my Very-Derry VRs.)
If you rotate to your right you are turning towards the town of Strabane and a fiddle player is the next figure to appear, before you reach the flute player in the middle.
If you rotate to your left you are turning towards the town of Lifford (in County Donegal) and a drummer is the next figure to appear, before you reach the flute player in the middle.
The novelist, Brian O'Nolan, better known under his nom de plume Flann O'Brien was born in Strabane in 1911. So perhaps anyone who knows his work will see the potential for these figures (standing as they are on the site of the old military/police border checkpoint) to be seen as characters from his famous book: The Third Policeman. In that book the policemen used bicycles. The longer they stayed on their bicycles the more the molecules were exchanged between policeman and steel bicycle.
"The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."
This is the final version for the March 2006 WWPP. Due to open on 1st April.