ABSTRACT
Despite its undoubted significance, the eighteenth century has long been neglected by historical geographers.1 No doubt this is largely due to the fact that it is a century which lacks major benchmark surveys, comparable to the Civil or Down Surveys for the seventeenth, and the Griffiths and Ordnance Survey maps for the nineteenth. Accordingly, although detailed analyses now exist for these two centuries, the eighteenth century is still a silent one in historical geographical discourse. Yet, its significance is undeniable: Cullen observes that ‘The Irish man-made landscape is essentially one of the eighteenth century.’2 This chapter then is a preliminary attempt to bridge the hiatus and special attention is paid to linking up the seventeenth-and nineteenthcentury work; in so doing, a strong diachronic dimension can be added to literature which is heavily synchronic in orientation. Thus, the chapter looks at a ‘long’ eighteenth century, with frequent regressions to the seventeenthcentury context, and extrapolations into the first half of the nineteenth. The focus is sharply on the interrelationship between society and settlement, especially as this is revealed in the landscape. However, settlement is treated here in a broad sense as a text, a multi-layered document, full of human intentionality, a culture code which embodies different levels of meaning. Couched in these terms, the study of settlement can move away from ‘the cold facts of land and landscape’ and engage with a much warmer and broader spectrum of meanings. In this view settlement is both medium and message, site and symbol, terrain and text.3
