ABSTRACT
Landscape has long served as both a metaphor and a source of imagery for the forging of Irish identities by artists, poets, playwrights, politicians, historians and geographers. Post-colonial studies of the early modern period (AD 1534-1700) in Ireland (wherein lie the historical roots of Northern Ireland’s profound ethnic, political and social divisions between Catholic and Protestant, or nationalist and loyalist communities) now increasingly emphasize the study of topography and cartography. This chapter uses early modern Irish archaeology, history and cartography to explore how a particular type of settlement site, the crannog or lake-dwelling, can be used as a metaphor to explore the clash between Gaelic Ireland and the English Tudor government in the late sixteenth century. In particular, the opposing perceptions of these island dwellings are shown to reflect two profoundly different views of landscape, place, culture and identity.
