ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to set aside stereotypical representations of place and explore, instead, the ways in which Ireland’s historical plurality has created-and continues to sustain-a complex diversity of regions and localities, each with their own orientations, experiences and mentalities. Since prehistory, the north, and especially the north-east, has had powerful if oscillating links across the narrow straits to Scotland, and beyond to northern England and the Scandinavian world. In contrast, the south-west of the island has looked more to France and Spain, a perspective often shared with the south-east. But this latter region has also always been intimately connected with Wales and the English West Country while, historically, the ‘Pale’ region around Dublin had a strong Irish Sea focus with powerful linkages along an axis from London to Chester. The far west was more weakly tied into a west European-often Iberian-orbit, but since the late sixteenth century its destiny has increasingly been interlocked with the cities of the eastern seaboard of America (Smyth 1978). Simultaneously, however, the insular qualities of Ireland as place has meant that many different experiences have had to be contained and shared within a narrow, often introverted, ground. The seemingly eternal quality of the dialectic between the northern and southern halves of the island reveals these compacting characteristics. Whether we look at the distribution of megalithic court tombs, Iron Age art, seventeenthcentury population patterns or twentieth-century maps of farm size, an old cultural frontier runs across the map, roughly dividing Leath Cuinn (the northern half) from Leath Moga (the southern) (Byrne 1973).
