Patrick O'Flanagan

RESTORATION OF SHEEP TRANSHUMANCE IN THE EBRO VALLEY, ARAGON, SPAIN*

For centuries, sheep transhumance has connected the Spanish highlands with the lowlands, creating a livestock system with important social, economic, cultural, and landscape effects. About 5 million sheep were involved in transhumant movements in the mid‐1700s, but transhumance started to decay in the nineteenth century and almost disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1980s, transhumant sheep did not number more than 25,000 in the study area; at present the number exceeds 134,000, with herders practicing both descending and ascending transhumance. In this article we provide information not only on current numbers of transhumant sheep but also on the origins and destinations of the flocks. We also confirm that the reputation of transhumance, once regarded as quaint and antiquated, has been enhanced by the ecosystem services it provides and by the cultural and heritage continuities it renders.

Markets and fairs in Ireland, 1600–1800: index of economic development and regional growth

Prior to the plantations in the late sixteenth, century, internal trade in Ireland was linked to a mainly pastoral economy subject to low levels of external and internal demand. This situation was radically and decisively transformed by the efforts of the colonial authorities who stimulated the development of a market economy by licensing a large number of market sites. By mapping the proliferation of legal and clandestine trading centres for fifty-year periods, it is possible to depict the configurations of a series of postulated modernization surfaces and relate these to the growth and intensification of specialist agricultural regions and trading centres. On this basis, some of the processes which contributed to the making of these postulated surfaces may be identified.

Rural change south of the river Bride in counties Cork and Waterford: the surveyors' evidence 1716–1851

Estate studies in Irish historical geography have been often designed to confirm or contrast local trends of development with those previously identified at the regional or sub-regional level. To date, little attention has been awarded to estate maps in studies of rural landscape change. It is a theme of this paper that the results yielded from a careful study of such estate maps can throw light on the results of the activities of the majority of estate residents. In this regard, it is fortunate that at Lismore surveys of the estate in 1716–17 and 1773–4 have survived, and a nineteenth century dimension is added by an analysis of the Valuation Office maps for 1851. This work is focused on a study of critical indicators of change, notably leasing arrangements, farm size, rate and type of enclosure, infrastructural development and settlement growth. These changes are reviewed within the framework of the dialectic that developed between landlord or landlord-inspired management policies and the forces release...

Housing, settlement and society in County Cork, Ireland: a profile analysis

Massive changes have taken place in the spatial structure of rural Irish society in the last three decades. A century or more of inexorable population decline has been replaced by growth which is evident even in some of the remotest parts of the island. 44.4% of the states population resided outside census towns in 1981, making it one of Europes most rural societies. An analysis of the links between the social and economic structure of the study area and its housing characteristics reveals a distinct spatial pattern, and it implicitly demonstrates the differential responses to the opportunities of the 1970s as depicted in a series of housing profiles. This work focuses on an analysis of these profiles within county Cork, which is Irelands largest and most varied county in terms of its physical and human endowments.