Living on the Landlord’s Island: Creation of the Island Home and Improvement in 18th to 20th Century Irish Residential Housing

Summary

If, as Henry Glassie argues, community is the space between hearths of Irish houses, then in many ways it was the landlord who framed the spatial geography and materiality of the 19th Irish household.  From 1750 to around 1910, individual absentee landlords owned the substantial islands of Inishturk, Inishbofin and Inishark inhabited by between 300 to 2,500 people.  As owners of these remote islands, and the villages and houses on their shores, the landlord leased land and seaweed rights, and houses to families that fished and farmed, often collectively.  Tenants were structurally discouraged from improving rented buildings, or investing in development.  In this presentation I discuss the material linkages between the transition around 1900 from tenant-farming under control of the landlord to individual ownership, and material footprint of national policy of improvement as seen through the lens of changing residential housing.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Workers’ Housing   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 508