Sea and Settlement in Ireland

Geraldine Stout & Matthew Stout

Ireland is an island, situated on the western fringes of Atlantic Europe. Any settlers to this island had to first cross the sea and it is this sea connection that brought new ideas, technologies and different cultures to this land. Nine chapters in this volume, written by twenty-two British and Irish scholars, explore the impact of maritime links on Irish settlement from pre-historic times to the eighteenth century. This collection of up-to-date, multidisciplinary research provides new international perspectives on Irish settlement. The oceans surrounding Ireland meant that it was never isolated from international developments, be that the spread of coastal trading outposts in the Bronze Age to piracy in the north Atlantic during the plantation period, or the notorious triangular trade in the eighteenth-century.

The seas were a uniting force, rather than a dividing one, and this is particularly the case In the early medieval period and the transmarine empire of the Anglo-Normans along the Irish Sea.

Geraldine Stout is an archaeologist, retired from the National Monuments Service. She has published on Cistercian landscapes and the Boyne Valley. Matthew Stout lectured on medieval history in the School of History and Geography, St Patrick’s Campus, DCU until his retirement in 2022.