posted on 2015-11-12, 11:10authored byRichard J. Butler
It is a truism that before humans set foot in
Ireland there was land, water, and nature. In a similar way, before
railways were planned and built in the nineteenth century,
there were hills and valleys, rivers, forests, as well as the hallmarks of centuries of human activity: roads
small and large, villages, and towns, woven together by centuries-old economic and social ties.
This human activity was at every stage
affected by the landscape
: rivers dictated settlement patterns, and mountains separated communities. In
time this relationship was inverted
as the landscape was
in turn
altered by streams diverted to power
mills, forests felled and cut up,
estates
planned
, and so on.
The railways continued this process of reforming the rural landscape, and the new specifications so characteristic of the engineering of the period–gradient and curvature–necessitated bolder and more magnificent disturbances of the natural
environment. [First paragraph]
History
Citation
Butler, RJ, Landscapes and architecture: the Cork & Bandon railway today, 'The Railways of West Cork: Reflections and Reminiscences', 2014, pp. 173-185
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/School of History