Farm Clusters in North-West Inishowen, c. 1850

Abstract

An extensive literature now exists on Irish rural settlement and land use in which geographers have contrasted the formally planned, economically diverse and enduring farm village of the south and east with the haphazard, classless, and ephemeral ‘clachan’ of the west. The relationship between ‘clachan’ growth and distance from progressive landlords has been outlined and many of their characteristics, including rundale. infield/outfield, kinship ties and communal enterprise among partnership farms, have been detailed. The interdependence between ‘clachan’ size, number and location, and resource (including agricultural and nonagricultural) potential has also been shown. However, few attempts have been made to distinguish the diagnostic features of this settlement form or to follow the sequential development of selected settlements.

Different areas developed various traditions associated with resource organisation, and the rationalisation of holdings, initiated by both landlord and tenant in the first half of the nineteenth century, proceeded at unequal rates. Certain elements of rundale and communal enterprise persisted only where they were profitable or where the financial means was not there to remove them. New settlements were continuously being developed and these were less likely to adopt a largely inefficient farming system. This paper demonstrates that even within one parish the ‘clachan’ form, at any one time, was far from uniform and classless.