historical geography and the irish historian

Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Historical Geography and the Irish HistorianAuthor(s): T. W. FreemanSource: Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 5, No. 18 (Sep., 1946), pp. 139-146Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30004843 .

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Historical geography and the Irish

historian

T wo themes are discussed in this article: first, the meaning and scope of ' historical geography' with reference to

various examples; and second, the possibility that Irish historians may plan enquiries into this field as part of their research-programme. The dangers involved in any effort to unite two separate yet related fields of learning are considerable; historical geography must be based on the work of those understanding each of the specialisations involved or, at least, willing to allow their work to be tested by the knowledge of an expert in the cognate field. It is not the purpose of this paper to apologise for geography; the steady advance of the teaching of it in schools and universities, its long-standing acceptance by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, its application to the problems of war and not less of post-war planning, and its intrinsic interest as a subject of study must be apparent to all those who have watched its modern recrudescence.

In various other countries, notably France, geography has advanced farther in technique and influence than in Ireland, partly because its practitioners, under the inspired guidance of Vidal de la Blache, have developed a clear conception of their possibilities and functions in the wider academic world. They have focussed their attention on the landscape, its physical form, vegetation, land-use, population, communications and industries, and have trained their youthful recruits to study first the home- environment in some part of France. In doing so, they have found that each landscape shows an accumulation of influences wrought out over hundreds, even thousands, of years, and so have produced geographical monographs that owe much to the guidance of historians.

The landscape of the greater part of Europe, including Ireland, is itself an end-product, settled and in part cultivated by at least a hundred generations, each of which has made some change in its appearance; woodland has been cleared, forests

139



140 Historical geography and the Irish historian

planted, roads made, houses built, quarries blasted, railways constructed, rivers used for mills or harnessed for electric power and lakes made into reservoirs. Not every landscape is so long settled, for even in Europe the Dutch have made and are still making polders so that they may have new land for an expanding population, and in the New World there are many areas intensively settled only for fifty years or even less. Humanity in the twentieth century is pressing on the search for new opportunities of settlement, and man's achievement seems mighty until the fate of the American Middle West dust-bowl supplies a salutary check to optimism.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the limits of human settlement have been reached in the Peace River valley of Canada, in the Middle West of the United States, or on the fringes of the Mongolian desert: there, are, however, virgin lands in the western valleys of China on the margins of Tibet and new areas opened for settlement in the Dutch polders created by the damming and partial drainage of the Zuyder Zee. In some places men have pushed their settlement into areas where it has failed; in others they are still extending their way of life into virgin territories or country constructed by the skill and enterprise of engineers. The landscape changes ceaselessly in any area occupied by people and its development or decay is often obvious to the seeing eye. Such changes may be the result of slow development, like the steady evolution of a river valley, or they may be sharp and sudden, like the quick moulding work of a river charged with floodwaters. Similarly, on the human plane, it is possible to recognise the gradual work of many generations or the sudden enterprise of a community at one stage: examples are given in France and the Netherlands, each of which will now be briefly considered.

The evolution of the French landscape is treated in one of the greatest geographical works ever written, Vidal de la Blache's Tableau de la gdographie de la France, which was issued as the first volume of E. Lavisse's Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu'd la revolution in 1904. In the introduction the author writes :

The history of a people is inseparably bound up with the country they occupy: thus, one can only understand the Greeks as a people living around Hellenic seas, the English as insular, the Americans as placed ini



Historical geography and the Irish historian I4.

the vast territories of the United States. Similarly, the history of the French people is rooted in the land that they have continuously occupied through long ages. Early in its settlement, men chose localities where they found the means of subsistence and materials for building or industry. Each locality has its own distinct way of life, evolved by many generations: springs on dry hillsides or limestone bluffs giving defensible sites attracted settlers many hundreds of years ago and are still occupied. The study of the land helps to illuminate the character, the customs, the activities (actual or possible) of the people who are there.

In essence, the theory of the French school is that those who study the history -of a country need also to understand its geography, and that those who view the present landscapes as geographers must appreciate the moulding influence of man during successive ages of occupation.

Those areas of the world which have been intensively occupied only for a short time offer fewer problems to the geographer than the long-settled landscapes. One example of a 'new' landscape may be given. The Wieringermeer polder, in the north-west of the Zuyder Zee, covers 75 square miles, is inhabited by 3,521 people (1937) and is divided into 255 farms of which some of 5o-Ioo acres are intended for dairying and others of more than Ioo acres for arable crops; this polder was constructed between 1925 and 1930, and the first crops were

grown in 1931. When seen by the writer in 1938, it was a neat, well-cultivated area, typical of many more in the Netherlands, and, like them, dependent for its very existence on the drains and canals that carry its waters to the sea. Here is human settlement in the first stage, the settlement of a people backed by all the resources of modern engineering, with their prospects of success tested by scientific method and their farming carried on under the care of a government anxious to settle its population problem partly by the creation of new land here, and in other large polders not yet completed. 'God created the world, except Holland', it has been said; 'Holland was created by the Dutch '.' We could not attempt to understand Dutch history without finding maps necessary at every stage, for the very form of the country had changed from one period to another.

The real appeal of historical geography lies in its effort to reach back through the ages to the generations which have lived

1 L. Febvre, A geographical introduction to history (London, 1932).



142 Historical geography and the Irish historian in a countryside from its beginnings, and it is precisely here that dangers begin to arise. There are not, says Febvre, four or five great geographical influences that weigh on humanity with a rigid and uniform influence; but 'the true and only geographical problem is that of the utilization of possibilities '. Men and women, confronted with a group of environmental conditions based on relief, soil, climate, and natural vegetation, and possessing certain aptitudes, equipment and traditions, evolve a particular type of life in a given area. One farmer reclaims new land, another allows the area farmed to contract: the limit of cultivation is pushed farther up a hillside or towards the menacing desert, and then recedes as people fail to find life profitable or are even confronted with starvation under adverse conditions. If one views life over thousands of years, the element of struggle culminating in victory or defeat may be apparent; from this, some will be led to generalise on 'man's conquest of nature ', regarding nature as something hostile and in need of taming, while others will be led to make sweeping judgements that overemphasise the unity between the present and the remote past and fail to recognise the ebb and flow of human experience from age to age. In a more optimistic period than this middle of the twentieth century, the idea of human progress might come more readily to mind; it is now easier to look on our struggles as comparable with those at other critical stages of history than to regard humanity as floating on a rising tide of achievement.

The marriage of history and geography is achieved in historical geography, but the nuptials compel neither party to shed its individuality, for in this union each has a distinct contribution to make. History gives the time aspect, geography the scene of action: the historical geographer is therefore able to show how people lived in a particular age in relation to the landscape of the time. It is possible to visualise the landscape of the mid-twentieth century by travel, maps and the analyses or description of others : the geographical student's training involves actual 'field work ', map interpretation, and reading, with the help of illustrations, about parts of the world that he may never visit. This branch of the subject, known as ' regional geography', fails to be effective unless it brings places, scenes and people into the mind of the student. The aim of the historical



Historical geography and the Irish historian I43

geographer is to give a similarly vivid impression for times past and scenes different from those of the present; or, quite simply, to depict the regional geography of the past.2

This type of historical geography involves the selection of phases as a basis for the evolutionary story. Ideally it would be desirable to show the regional geography at intervals of a few years, but obviously that is rarely practicable. In The historical geography of England before A.D. 800oo (ed. H. C. Darby, Cambridge, 1936), chapters deal with Roman times, the Anglo-Saxon penetration and settlement, and the life of the fourteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and other centuries. While the treatment is varied, according to the material available and the individuality of the eleven collaborators, each chapter gives a picture that is at once historical and geographical. The geographers have carried their work into the past, seeking as far as possible the material that they would use for a regional geography of the present. One example must suffice here: with the aid of the admirable Ordnance survey map of Roman Britain (2nd edition, 1928) and a wide variety of other sources, E. W. Gilbert has given an effective picture of the geography of Britain in Roman times (Darby, pp. 30-87), showing that the Romans laid the foundations of many towns, including London, and also of the country's road system. The recognition of geographical factors is a marked feature of Roman Britain and the English settlements (1936; 2nd edition, 1937) by R. G. Collingwood and Professor Sir J. N. L. Myres, whose maps are far superior to those in many standard histories.

While the recognition of geographical factors must enrich any historical work, the borrowing of material is fraught with dangers as the borrower may find it difficult to distinguish between a 'proved fact' and an hypothesis. The duality of Britain has been stressed recently by Sir Cyril Fox in the Personality of Britain (Cardiff, 1932, 1933, 1943); Britain is divided into a highland and a lowland zone, of which the former is composed of older (harder) rocks which 'tend to be mountainous' and the latter of younger (softer) rocks which

2 See E. W. Gilbert, 'XWhat is historical geography?', in Scottish Geographical Mag., xlviii (1932). I29-36; ' What is historical geography?: a symposium organised by the Geographical Association', in Geography, xvii (I932). 39-45.




are 'low-lying'. The basis of demarcation here is the age of the rocks, as those of the Archaean and Palaeozoic eras are 'highland' and those of the secondary and tertiary eras (Triassic onwards) are 'lowland'. There are, as Fox points out, many 'lowland' rocks within the 'highland'; but the main thesis is allowed to stand and there are signs that it will be widely accepted by historians and others. The treatment of this duality given by H. J. Mackinder, in his Britain and the British seas (Oxford, 1902, 1907) is far more guarded. The danger lies in over-generalisation: it is not true that old rocks are necessarily harder, nor are hard rocks likely to form mountains unless a combination of physical circumstances is favourable to such a development. The whole of Ireland, except for part of the north-east, would be a highland on such a demarcation as that employed by Fox, as its rocks, both in the lowlands and the upland, are of the Palaeozoic era, but actually Ireland could more suitably be regarded as a lowland relieved from monotony by numerous uplands and plateaux.

The historical geography of early Ireland is the subject of a monograph by Professor W. Fitzgerald, whose pioneer work,3 like that of the French collaborators under Vidal de la Blache, begins with a regional treatment and then deals with various phases from the 'dawn of civilization' to the Scandinavian settlement. The advance of historical and geographical research in Ireland stimulates the hope that a series of essays- may be compiled on the lines of Darby's book. Such a task is obviously beyond the power of any single writer. While the Romans were laying the foundations of organised life in Britain, chiefly in the English lowland, Ireland lay outside such systematising influence, but its people developed Late Celtic art towards its ultimate perfection. As the Anglo-Saxon settlements spread through the England lowland, Ireland became a centre of missionary enterprise and still remained sharply distinct in its life from Britain. The fortunes of Ireland became, however, more closely linked with those of its eastern neighbour from the Scandinavian period; and as the Anglo-Norman age was succeeded by the Tudor conquest, and by the Tudor and Stuart plantations, more complex relations followed. The need is to

- The historical geography of early Ireland (The Geographical Teacher supplement I, 1925). See above, ii. IIo-II.



Historical geography and the Irish historian i45

study each period with geographical as well as historical material and method, so that the one may illuminate the other.

The mapping of all suitable data will be an essential feature of such studies: one cannot resist the impression that some historians (and even some geographers) have regarded maps merely as an interesting addition to their text and not as an integral part of it. The maps necessary include not only those showing boundaries of administrative divisions, Norman lord- ships, Irish territories, or whatever form of division existed at a particular period, but also, if possible, those showing the distribution of woodland, agricultural areas, villages and towns, density of population and, for towns, the layout and exact position at a given and stated time. Not all these maps can be made, as the data may not be available: the ordnance survey maps of Ireland date only from the thirties of the nineteenth century and many of the earlier maps are difficult to interpret satisfactorily. It is, however, possible to use the maps critically, together with descriptive material, and to transfer the information to the modern base provided by the ordnance survey. Coastlines and courses of rivers have been altered in many cases, especially in the areas now occupied by Dublin and Belfast. Medieval Dublin stood on firm ground overlooking a marsh belt occasionally flooded by a spreading Liffey that was confined, from the eighteenth century, between two lines of quays. The data accumulated by the officers of the Geological Survey, and published in the Memoir of the geological survey, sheet 112, Dublin (1903), gives a useful indication of the extent of the ' made ground' : one may view the reclamation now proceeding around Dublin bay as comparable with that of two hundred years ago around the Liffey, in what is now the centre of the city.

The form of the landscape in any past age differs from that of the present to a greater or less degree; in Ireland, as in France, the imprint of industrialization is less severe than in England and one may, therefore, look back to the early part of the eighteenth century with less clouded eyes. Even so, the transformation of the peasantry from tenants to owners of their holdings, the improvement of rural housing, never more marked than now, and, not least, the decline of the population by one half in a hundred years, have all been vital influences on the landscape. Many of the demesne lands, once so striking a




feature of the landscape, are now allocated to a variety of uses, including industrial and housing estates, as at Dundalk, groups of small farms, as at Mitchelstown, co. Cork, or forestry plantations, as at Inistioge, co. Kilkenny. Only the walls, the gateways and gate lodges remain in many cases, and thus already one feature of the landscape is disappearing so quickly that in a few years the visible imprint of the power of the landed gentry will be forgotten. A backward glance even to the middle of the nineteenth century shows changes of some magnitude: it may be possible to make a study of the historical geography of 1845, as at that date the country had been mapped by the ordnance survey, statistics of considerable accuracy already existed, and there is an abundance of documentary evidence. The Ireland of 1851 was a vastly different place from the Ireland of I841; no other time shows more clearly the need for historical geographers to date their work exactly.

General studies dealing with the whole of Ireland are needed, but it is equally to be hoped that particular areas will receive detailed attention. The studies of Belfast by Professor E. E. Evans4 and of Dublin by Mr J. P. Haughton' take single towns as their themes: valuable work may also be done by those who will take some region at a particular time, or at several ages. A worker might study the lowlands between the Leinster chain and the §ea, the Leinster chain itself, or again, the English Pale at one or more chosen ages. As all geographical accounts of a country such as Ireland or France depend on the detailed local studies and are derived from them, so the final synthesis in historical geography must come from studies of a similarly confined character. The ultimate results will probably be entirely different from the imaginings of the present and may change the teaching of both history and geography in Ireland to a considerable degree.

4'The site of Belfast', in Geography, xxii (1937), 169-77, and 'Belfast: the site and the city ', in U.J.A., 3rd series, vii (1944), 5-29.

5 ' The site of Dublin', in Geog. Soc. Ire. Bull., i, no. 3 (1946), pp. 53-6.

T. W. FREEMAN



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