Landscape, Settlement and Society in West Waterford, AD 1600-1900: an Historical Archaeology (submitted 2010)
David A. Whelan
Supervisor: Professor Tadhg O’Keeffe
Funded by: The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Abstract
My thesis is a study of the topographically-coherent region of 250 square miles formed by the river valleys of the Araglin, Bride and middle Blackwater in west Waterford and north Cork. This area is best known through its association with Richard Boyle, the earl of Cork, who became the main beneficiary of the Munster Plantation and before him, The Fitzgeralds, earls of Desmond, the Anglo –Irish family whose failed rebellion precipitated the above plantation. It is a landscape of considerable interest for students of the later historic times ( the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries); in part because its cultural development in this period was shaped by plantation- period settlement politics; in part because it possesses a remarkable range of great walled Georgian demesnes and in part because large numbers of low-income Catholic families huddled in cabins in the hills behind the riverside façade of the many great Georgian houses.
The principal aim of this research is to provide a comprehensive documentation and analysis of this landscape’s archaeology in this historic period. This will entail mapping in micro-detail the ‘textures of landscape.This will include the recording of field boundary types, types of land drainage, and plans of houses (both ‘traditional’ and landlord) as well as traces of cultivation and of land clearance. Within the demesnes I will be recording the “demesne package” features and garden features, the designs of tree plantations and so on. My research aims to establish the chronology of the landscape at two levels: the general, cross regional level, and the local townland –based level. My research also aims to generate a narrative of landscape development that embraces diverse bodies of evidence –landscape and architecture, vista and industry; text and materiality- and that balances historical specificity with generalization about wider , generic , social /cultural processes in landscape formation.
Regarding Historical Archaeology, my aim is to contribute to the promotion of, and to the generation of methodology for, the field in Ireland through the successful prosecution of research in west Waterford.
The Towers, Ballysaggartmore, Co. Waterford
Salterbridge Demesne, Cappoquin, Co. Waterford
The Towers, Ballysaggartmore, Co. Waterford