White bungalows and Victoria churches

[Lucydogz]

We're in the middle of our Irish holiday and would love to ask a few questions about it..would anyone like to help me out?
Why so many white bungalows?
Why so few churches older than 19th century?
Who lives in the enormous new detached houses, set in the middle of nowhere?
In case this sounds judgemental - we love it here (except for the bloody weather)

[FreeButtonBee]

All the Catholic Churches were razed to the ground by the British.

Most people lived on their land in tenant cottages (build from stone). There were few estate farms, it was majority sustenance farming for bare survival. Then the potato famine happened and millions died or fled for their lives. So the stone cottages crumbled into the earth. I think the population now is still lower than pre famine. So it was only in the 70/80/90 that people could build homes and small simple bungalows were cheap and easy to build. And people build on their own land so they are scattered all over the shop.

[FreeButtonBee]

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Laws_(Ireland) This explains how restricted Catholicism was.

[Lucydogz]

Thank you for that. I knew about the famine and penal laws, but hadn't thought about the effect on housing - nor about pulling the churches down. I've got a lot of history to read up on when we get home. We're outside Enniskillen at the moment and finding the whole Plantation issue very interesting.

[wobblywonderwoman]

The large detached houses - these were due to the property boom. It doesn't mean the people living in them are usually well off or anything. Couples probably inherited the site and built at very reasonable cost.

[geekaMaxima]

Ireland also never had the traditional feudal structure of serf villages around a manor house that was common in the rest of Europe. There were towns based around either castles (even before the Normans) or abbeys, but not a huge number. Instead, people tended to live scattered around on their own land (owned or rented), in loose clusters not too far from their nearest neighbours, within a few miles of some focus that was basically a wide spot in the road with a smith, holy well, coach stop, fair, etc. plus the inevitable church/chapel.

There are echoes of this culture in the distributed housing you see today - it's still normal not to build in a village.

Villages - with concentrated houses and residents - only really came into their own during the 17th -18th century plantations in Ireland when the ascendency started building stately piles and often threw up a few cottages for the staff at the same time. Lots of villages and towns were planned at that time to service the local big landowner, usually building around a local church.

Many older churches were enclosed in plantation estates at this time and were effectively closed because the population couldn't access them, and have since disappeared. Other churches that didn't have a village built around them fell into disuse as people started going to the village church and have disappeared from the landscape.

You still see the occasional church out in its own in rural areas with no village around it. These are the remnants of the old system of churches serving distributed communities.

Finally, following gradual repeal of the penal laws in late 18th and early 19th centuries - plus the fading of the ascendency after the Irish Parliament was dissolved - the Catholic Church started investing more money in Ireland and building convents, schools, etc. all over the place. These actions were stepped up after the famine as the church sought to gain firmer control of a country it considered half pagan, with stronger beliefs in fairies and holy wells than in church dogma.

Most village and town churches were rebuilt in the 19th century as a result of this cultural indoctrination building programme, flattening the smaller chapels and building grander-looking replacements. Most churches in Ireland are relatively recent, but occupy a site that has probably held a church for hundreds of years.

[SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman]

Really interesting! Thank you for this thread.

[Lucydogz]

Fascinating geeka. Thank you. It feels odd, travelling around NI, that it is like, yet unlike, England. Are there any history books that you'd recommend for the 16th to 19th centuries?
Also, did the Plantations cover the whole of Ireland, or just the East?

[geekaMaxima]

Lucy I don't know any really good books on the period I could recommend, especially when it comes to social history and the fabric of the landscape. Most books tend to be politically oriented, which is fair enough but neglects what 99% of the population experienced day to day. Or they tend to be exclusively focused on a very narrow period of time and don't have the broader context.

I've gleaned what I know from a wide and messy range of sources where the info about the social landscape makes up about 5-10% of the content

The best written overview of Ireland's social history and change that I've seen is probably the Dublin novels by Edward Rutherfurd. Yes, they're fiction and compress some timelines here and there, but they're well-researched and probably as accurate regarding social history as any one historian's interpretation of the period. The second book covers 16th - 20th centuries, and much of it applies to Ireland more broadly rather than just Dublin.

[geekaMaxima]

Oh - and the plantations happened everywhere except west of the Shannon. Officially, Dublin and the Pale wasn't planted but had a high concentration of English and Welsh settlement for other reasons (govt and trade, mostly).

Wiki has some good maps, although they leave out small scale planted settlements, esp in the south-west.

[geekaMaxima]

South-east! Not sw

[ComedyWing]

Yes to what geeka said. The exotic thing for me about being Irish and living in rural England is just that lack of wholescale clearance caused by colonisation - the existence of Saxon/Norman churches in every little village around us, lots of 17thc and earlier houses (cottages and manor houses), and how much ancient woodland there is compared to Ireland, where a huge amount of it was deliberately culled.

[FurryDogMother]

A book I found to be a good introduction to (modern) Irish history is 'The Great Hunger' by Cecil Woodham Smith. It's (fairly obviously) about the famine of 1845-49. Not a difficult read, but very informative, because the famine had so many ramifications.

[geekaMaxima]

If you're in NI at the moment, bear in mind it has had quite a different history to the rest of Ireland since the 17th century.

NI experienced intensive plantation after the flight of the earls, largely in revenge for rebellion led by the Ulster Gaelic aristocracy, and was fuelled by a lot of nonsense but effective propaganda that the Irish were savage nomads with no concept of farming, etc. It came as a bit of a shock to some of the plantation settlers that their allocated land was not in virgin or friendly territory, but smack in the middle of a well-established Gaelic community who were unsurprisingly angry at being evicted from lands they had lived and worked on since time immemorial. The resulting conflicts triggered the Cromwellian invasion in Ireland.

Also, most of the persuaded plantation settlers in NI were Scottish Presbyterians rather than established Church of England, and they came in larger numbers and over a longer time period than planters elsewhere in Ireland. By the 18th century, Presbyterians were the largest religious group in what's now NI, followed by Catholics, followed lastly by CoI / CoE.

Unfortunately, one result was that the divisions in NI between native Irish and planted settlers followed obvious religious lines (poor-to-middling farmers could be either Presbyterian planters or Catholic Irish, and long-rooted tensions stopped them from mixing), as opposed to the rest of Ireland where it was conflated with class (tiny population of wealthy CoI landowners and a large population of poor Irish Catholic tenants, with a smattering of Protestant dissenters across the country). These religious tensions in NI of course formed the background to the Troubles.

Meanwhile, plantations in the rest of Ireland were too small to be wholesale effective, as the planted Protestant settler farmers often did mix with and marry into the Irish Catholic population. There were tensions and conflicts, but not necessarily along religious lines - case in point, the leaders of the 1798 rebellion were Protestant of all stripes as well as Catholic, who saw no inherent conflict between religion and Irish cultural identity.

The resurgence of catholic church control in the 19th century introduced and intensified religious divisions, unfortunately. Yet another slow hand clap for the Catholic Church...

[Lucydogz]

Thanks again geek, I find all of that very interesting. Earlier in our holidays, we went to the Mussenden temple, and Frederick Hervey (the Earl Bishop) who built it, seems to have been remarkable in his tolerance, especially given the period he lived in.
Oh yes, another question, are the long, straight, wide, but minor roads associated with the Plantations?

[geekaMaxima]

A lot of road building was related to the plantations, partly to link up the new planned market towns and partly to move military units more easily.

Not sure about the general straightness of the roads, though! I suspect there's a lot of local variation

[squoosh]

I think the population now is still lower than pre famine.

Prior to the famine the population was just over 8 million! Today it's at about 4.5.

[Aisling28]

Re the white bungelows, someone brought out a book in the 70s with plans for bungelows in them. Builder could build them really cheap.
The large detached houses are usually just an ordinary family. I know families with 1 or 2 kids in them . Expensive to run and heat but people still build them. Often own the site from their parents farm. Ive English relatives and they cant get over the size of them.

[DeanElderberry]

The population of Ireland now is about 7 million, just over 5m in RoI, nearly 2m in NI. Still a way off 1840s level.

Pre-Penal law chuches are usually now ruins in graveyards - most parishes still have a burial ground site that has been in use for well over a millennium - in NI there is a bit more chance that the Church of Ireland still has an active church building - in the rest of the country many of them fell into disuse and were eventually demolished.

When it became legal to build Catholic churches, people were delighted to exercise that freedom - it beat clandestine open-air gatherings. Greenfield sites near villages were used and money raised locally, and from the 1830s onwards, in America (from emigrants who had prospered), to build them. Before the famine they were often simple rectangular or T-shaped 'barn churches', and were sometimes used during the week as schools and for other community functions. The Presbyterians in Ulster used the same building shape - for them it was important that everyone could see and hear the preacher - in Catholic churches it was important that everyone could see the elevation of the host during the eucharistic prayer.

Obviously there was hardly any building in the 1840s, and in 1850 the Synod of Thurles set out a new Catholic orthodoxy that set out the ways church buildings were used - the blessed sacrament was kept in the church instead of in the priest's house, and the church became a space for religious services only. Private chapels in the houses of wealthy Catholics were also banned. Architects became more involved and churches became more elaborate - but there are a lot of late 18th and early 19 century Catholic churches out there. Members of the congregation contributed to the furnishing and decoration of the churches.

White bungalows - a modern version of the traditional Irish rural house - I had an uncle who was really scared if he had to sleep upstairs - like a hobbit..

[Soonenough]

White bungalows , built off plans in that 70s book referred to .Complete with septic tanks and sometimes water from wells. Not much planning put into their location as usually just a family site. This boom in building radom bungalows everywhere is referred to as The Bungalow Blight .
Being from Southern Ireland , when in NI especially in Belfast suburbs is a completely alien environment. Difference in architecture, street plans , etc. as it adopted the English model.
Sorry about the weather, but hope you enjoy your trip. 😀

[Abhannmor]

Can't explain the mahoosive houses. EU grants maybe? Weird though ....birth rate plummeting and 5 bedroom houses sprouting up everywhere. The tank like 4WD cars are often a way of avoiding tax. Can be written off as expenses . Vital for my job of letting cattle out of one field and into another 😂.

To be fair people are breaking out of white bungalow syndrome. All the colours of the day round here. And you get Mock Tudor , Dallas Ranch and some Dutch looking yokes too.

[Lozza70]

The enormous detached houses in Fermanagh are because you either get a plot of land from your family or the land was relatively cheap to buy, compared to mainland UK. Then it’s not as expensive to build. It can be traditional in farming families for young couples to get a parcel of land to build. All very lovely but jobs hard to come by so many kids leave at 18 and never make it back home, massive brain drain.