"Vol. 1 provides a comparative study of walled towns in Ireland, reviews the conceptual basis of towns ... [and] the distribution of walled towns ... is examined from historical and geographical viewpoints. Vol. 2 provides a gazetteer to 91 sites ..."--Jacket.

A study of the development of walled towns in Ireland between A.D. 700 & 1700.

Town walls were a common heritage for many Irish towns over long periods. The majority date from the Anglo-Norman period, but trends can be recognized which represent common themes throughout the centuries, especially the use of walled towns as 'refuges' for colonization projects. This study identifies, through surviving structures and documentary and murage evidence, the walled towns of Ireland. It provides a comprehensive investigation of site, shape, size (walled area and circuit length), structure (curtain walls, gates and towers, fosse, ramparts, associated castle/forts, and harbors) and construction, including length of time and financial arrangements. Defensive and other uses are considered. Volume 2 is the gazetteer companion of Volume 1. It comprises most of the larger and more important walled towns and includes as well many of the smaller Irish towns and even some whose development failed to make progress.

The story of each of 20 key settlement areas throughout Ireland, illustrated with contemporary photographs as well as historical maps and drawings.

Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses the emergence of towns, urban lifestyles, and urban identities in Ireland. This coincides with the arrival of the Vikings and the appearance of the post-and-wattle Type 1 house. These houses reflect this crucial transition to urban living with its attendant changes for individuals, households, and society. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns uses household archaeology as a lens to explore the materiality, variability, and day-to-day experiences of living in these houses. It moves from the intimate scale of individual households to the larger scale of Ireland’s earliest urban communities. For the first time, this book considers how these houses were more than just buildings: they were homes, important places where people lived, worked, and died. These new towns were busy places with a multitude of people, ideas, and things. This book uses the mass of archaeological data to undertake comparative analyses of houses and properties, artefact distribution patterns, and access analysis studies to interrogate some 500 Viking-Age urban houses. This analysis is structured in three parts: an investigation of the houses, the households, and the town. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses how these new urban households managed their homes to create a sense of place and belonging in these new environments and allow themselves to develop a new, urban identity. This book is suited to advanced students and specialists of the Viking Age in Ireland, but archaeologists and historians of the early medieval and Viking worlds will find much of interest here. It will also appeal to readers with interests in the archaeology of house and home, households, identities, and urban studies.

The untold story of a group of Irish cities and their remarkable development before the age of industrialization A backward corner of Europe in 1600, Ireland was transformed during the following centuries. This was most evident in the rise of its cities, notably Dublin and Cork. David Dickson explores ten urban centers and their patterns of physical, social, and cultural evolution, relating this to the legacies of a violent past, and he reflects on their subsequent partial eclipse. Beautifully illustrated, this account reveals how the country’s cities were distinctive and—through the Irish diaspora—influential beyond Ireland’s shores.