Rural Planning II: Towns

A Plan of Dromana

 Livia Hurley

 A fundamental tool to make sense of the world at various scales, a map captures topographic space while also serving as a vessel of memory, archiving a particular moment in time with the detail of landscapes, buildings, boundaries and routes that may have long since been altered or erased. In Map, one of Wisława Szymborska’s final poems – a meditation on the distance between representation and reality – the poet critiques the comforting illusion of order that is created when we attempt to control and simplify our world through the abstraction of a map. She confesses her affection for them is based on how they might deceive us:

I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world’.(1)

All of the above applies in some way to the Plan of Dromana made in 1751 by the surveyor Henry Jones, in the so-called French School style of cartography, a relatively new method of estate mapping in Ireland at that point.(2) Jones’s highly graphic survey of the demesne at Dromana and the neighbouring village of Villierstown, Co. Waterford, illustrates the ambitions of its landowners, the Villiers family, providing a snapshot of the improvement and development of a typical estate during the aspirational years of the Enlightenment.

Described on the map as ‘a new and neat Colony erected … for the advancement of the Linen Manufacture…’, Dromana reminds us that this was a country on the cusp of an economic boom with emergent textile industries. It was also a period of social engineering grounded in a theory that environments could challenge and shape the behaviour of inhabitants, and this could be accomplished towards socially progressive ends. The map presents us with the carefully delineated and colour-washed landscapes of the estate, with its mansion perched on the promontory above a busy River Blackwater, its gardens and oak plantations filling in space between bluff and boundary, and its avenue winding through the grounds to connect the landlord with his village like a long piece of string. Drawings here of estate labourers in full garb, grouped with their animals and implements, were quite unique in eighteenth-century Irish cartography, underscoring the ideology of a utopian world (4.1). Can this map be read as an exact representation of what was on the ground or is it a fantasy? In truth it’s a hybrid: part record, part proposal. Accepting the fact that an east-west orientation has been favoured to depict the demesne from the river, when Dromana is compared with evidence from the first-edition Ordnance Survey map (1839-41), landscapes and boundaries appear to have been minutely observed and recorded. The same could be said for most of the principal demesne features and its architecture, illustrated in a series of slightly crude vignettes lining the edge of the map, and catalogued in a key in one of Jones’s baroque cartouches.

Irish eighteenth-century settlement, both planned and remodelled, was largely designed as a kind of studied formalism where urban footprints were laid out with vistas framed by public buildings, malls were lined with terraced street fronts, squares and greens expanded the plan at regular intervals, and a sense of symmetry and rigour pervaded throughout.(4) Configurations varied from the rigid linear form – for instance at Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, and Strokestown, Co. Roscommon (4.3) – to the elliptical common at Tyrellspass, Co. Westmeath; from triangular greens like Malin, Co. Donegal, to the striking grid-iron pattern of Fermoy, Co. Cork. Squares were either large civic spaces in towns like Birr, Co. Offaly, and Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, or layered like the sloping central diamonds at Clones, Co. Monaghan and Monaghan town. Spatial expression was defined by the axial arrangement of those totems of Irish provincial architecture: church, market house, courthouse, and demesne gates. In the post-1760 decades, while layouts continued to follow classical principles, new village types emerged at sites like Johnstown, Co. Kildare, Westport, Co. Mayo, Stratford-on-Slaney, Co. Wicklow, and Slane, Co. Meath (4.4), where crescents and octagons produced a more dynamic space within which public life rotated.

Along with flour and alcohol industries, textile production reinforced much of the country’s industrial network. Its relocation away from larger cities to the countryside was encouraged and supported by the government. New linen colonies emerged at Ballyhaise, Co. Cavan, Inishannon, Co. Cork, Monivea, Co. Galway, and Castlewellan, Co. Down; all more or less contemporaneous with Villierstown.(6) Not all of these industrial enterprises were entirely successful and it would be the next century before more effective models emerged, most of them created by industrialists focussing on the combination of workers’ accommodation with social infrastructure, incorporating the principles of utopian socialism. Two of these settlements based on cotton manufacture, at Bessbrook, Co. Armagh (4.5), and Portlaw, Co. Waterford, were shaped and driven by their Quaker owners. The notion of utopia was ever-present in the Quaker’s ethical outlook and social philosophy but their desire to establish themselves as the new middle-class in Irish society also played a significant role. Portlaw, not too far from Dromana, was developed in three phases between 1825 and 1870; in its most radical reworking the central terraces were swept away in lieu of a baroque polyvium configuration (4.6), with triangular blocks of low-slung housing bookended by commercial structures, all converging on a geometrically ordered market square. The composition of this footprint produced a long and narrow allotment plot for each house, underpinning ideas around self-sufficiency, while also creating a private domestic realm for the workers.