archaeological & built heritage assessment - The Heritage Council

castles; while others were uncastellated planned towns, attached onto a main street broad enough to
accommodate the all-important market (ibid.). Outside the towns, small manorial villages also developed.
These were nucleated villages of feudal origin containing castles, parish churches and manorial mills. The
administrative town framework originally set up by the Normans was to feature largely in many Irish
towns throughout the succeeding centuries during the late medieval period.
Seventeenth century changes
The impacts of the Reformation, landownership changes, economic and social restructuring, especially in
post-Cromwellian times, meant that the previous foci of the tower house and parish church were
dissolved. Protestant landlords were eager to promote the Anglican Church by occupying new sites, often
as the centrepiece of the new towns. Older parish centres went into disuse and ruin as a result.
The abandonment of medieval churches, the displacement of the old landowning elite and a new
commercialised pastoral agriculture meant that the indigenous population of these villages ultimately
deserted the settlements. However, the plantation process did initiate a further wave of town and village
formation. Approximately 400 new urban centres were created by landlords within their estates as
commercial, legal and military bastions in a potentially hostile environment. Towns and villages were the
fundamental features of plantation strategy, which brought about infrastructural development (roads, mills,
bridges, castles) and a central state presence (court house, barracks, gaol) (ibid.). Throughout the late
seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries a number of the towns and villages located within the study area
evolved from the direction of land-owning families that were granted lands, such as those areas
surrounding Cootehill (Coote family), Jamestown (Coote Family), Mohill (Crofton family), Strokestown
(Packenham-Mahon family) and Boyle (King family).
Estate towns and villages
The early eighteenth century was a relatively peaceful time when the landed classes developed a series of
regularly planned estate villages, formally designed around a wide main street or market square.
Furthermore, country houses and demesnes replaced the earlier castle as a place of residence. A final
phase in estate town foundation was the influx of new landlord settlement into the western regions of the
country. This pushing west was linked to efforts to remodel rundale systems, and to open up areas only
recently settled as a result of population pressure, and with no pre-existing village tradition. Road building
was a critical enabling development and this is expressed by the establishment of new settlements at
western road heads, as the market economy spread along the new roads.
These western towns were also helped by the advent of a tourist industry. Blocked from the Continental
Grand Tour by the French Revolution, British travellers and tourists turned instead to their Celtic
periphery (Aalen, Whelan & Stout 1997). This redirection was helped too by the new vogue for
‘romantick’ scenery and by the rising popularity of the seaside. Throughout the eighteenth century, resort
towns had been inland spas, whilst new settlements developed in coastal areas as the popularity of seabathing
intensified in the late eighteenth century.
By the famine of the 1840s, the impetus behind the foundation of estate villages had finally petered out
and the Victorian period saw only cosmetic remodellings or development of miniature ‘pretty’ villages
(ibid.).
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