Wexford Castles : Environment, Settlement and Society

Billy Colfer's Wexford Castles expands the IRISH LANDSCAPES series by taking a thematic approach, while still staying loyal to the central landscape focus.Rather than adapting a narrowly architectural approach, he situates these buildings in a superbly reconstructed historical, social, and cultural milieu.County Wexford has three strikingly different regions - the Anglo-Norman south, the hybridised middle and the Gaelic north - which render it a remarkable version in parvo of the wider island.Colfer's wide-angle lens takes in so much than the castles themselves, as he ranges widely and deeply in reading these striking buildings as texts, revealing the cultural assumptions and historical circumstances which shaped them.In this most cosmopolitan of counties, we range far and wide in search of the wide-spreading roots of its cultural landscape - from the Crusades and the Mani peninsula in Greece to the Bristol Channel, from Crac des Chevaliers to Westminster, from the Viking north and the