Writing and landscape in early modern Ireland

While colonial contact provides a complex model of inter-ethnic relations,
no issue would appear to be more dominant, nor more immediate to the
initial stages of arrival, than the subject of land. The issue of how best to
establish a hold over a landscape, how to possess it and to make of it a
place of uniformity and order is one of the most immediate of tasks to be
addressed. Of course, a colony may prosper and survive and, in terms of
policy making and general administration, move on to other considerations,
but in the period between the initial impact of a foreign and, frequently,
technologically superior power and the pacification and 'good government'
of the colony lies the difficulty of reorganisation and plantation: the building
of towns and fortifications, the establishment of harbours and coastal
defences, the mapping of the landscape as well as the problematics of native
land ownership and habitation.