The project

In 2012 the Irish Research Council agreed to fund an interdisciplinary project on ‘The Colonial Landscapes of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, c. 1602–1643’, involving a team of historians and archaeologists at University College Cork under the leadership of Dr David Edwards. The project set out to reconstruct Boyle’s vast estate, charting its extent, the tenants who lived on it, the methods by which it was organised, and the influence it had on the social and economic life of seventeenth-century Munster. Particularly close attention has been paid to his mining and industrial enterprises, on which he expended vast sums and the overgrown remains of which are still identifiable in the landscape today. A conference at UCC in June 2013, ‘The World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork’ (the proceedings of which are to be published in a forthcoming book), examined his career and possessions from a variety of perspectives, political and military, religious and cultural. Also in preparation is a monograph charting the growth and management of Boyle’s landholdings during his lifetime, the first comprehensive study of a Plantation-era estate in Ireland.