In their pioneering book, Townlands in Ulster, Bill Crawford and Bob Foy point the way towards a massively ambitious project: a complete study of the island of Ireland’s townland system. This will eventually be built from studies of all its 62,205 townlands. Starting small, they present eight ‘model’ townland studies, by different authors, to demonstrate how each townland is a potential ‘place of interest’ for a family or local historian –and who is to say any particular townland is not!
The hope for Townlands in Ulster was that it would inspire others to research and publish their own townland studies, adopting the ‘semi-structured framework’ which Crawford & Foy had devised for their eight authors. ‘Our Framework’, as they called it, has nine headings:
- Introduction
- Location
- History and tradition before the Plantation
- Estates and the creation of farms
- Population growth and decline
- Housing changes
- Changing farm practices
- Development of communication and markets
- The community and its traditions
Is there any townland-related data that could not be framed by one of these?
Townlands in Ulster was reviewed with great enthusiasm in Familia 14 (1998). How well have its expectations been fulfilled? A review article in Familia 37 (2021) considers this question, and concludes by urging completion of the great Crawford & Foy project through the development of a new townland-based, digital (GIS) mapping resource that will facilitate the systematic, comparative study of family and local history at the townland level. For anyone interested in engaging with this endeavour, Townlands in Ulster remains indispensable as a primary guide