‘Nations,’ political geographer Jim MacLaughlin tells us, ‘literally have to be built from the ground up.’Footnote ¹ During the Irish Revolution, republicans engaged in the construction of a counter-state which included the sporadic application of alternative policing arrangements and a judiciary in the form of Dáil courts, as well as a representative assembly that was driven underground for much of the War of Independence. However, several recent and highly original works of scholarship underline once again that the revolutionary period was as much about destroying British state apparatus and perceived symbols of colonialism as it was about creating a new nation-state. This thread of destruction has been explored from a micro-level (the burning of a village) to a national level (the burning of roughly 300 country houses). Justin Dolan Stover's highly anticipated Enduring ruin examines environmental destruction between 1916 and 1923 utilising a broad definition of environment that incorporates man-made structures, and their destruction, alongside rural landscapes. Stover's palpable rendering of the Easter Rising, for example, contends that ‘artillery bombardment, machine-gun fire, ensuing fires, looting, the collapse of asbestos-lined tenements, human and animal casualties, and odours indicative of unattended death grounded the rebellion's ruinous scope’ (p. 8). Enduring ruin innovatively elucidates the impact of this unique ‘sensory stamp’ on combatants and civilians while chronicling how propagandists utilised the imagery and language of the Great War to cultivate a sense of victimhood and elicit international sympathy (pp 12–13, 112–18). Other chapters examine the impact of less overtly political environmental damage and the impact of reprisals by crown forces. Like Donlon and Dooley's monographs, Stover tactfully considers the interaction between landscape and people throughout, drawing attention to the important area of the revolutionary period's impact on the mental health of combatants and civilians (pp 74, 92–7). This work adds a highly original perspective by presenting the impact of tree felling, road trenching and incendiarism, contrasting the ‘romanticism’ of sawing trees ‘by hand under the cover of darkness’ with ‘the disillusionment of the mechanised evisceration of nature experienced along the Western Front’ (p. 61). Alongside using weather reports to illustrate how ‘extreme weather did not stymy guerrilla activity’, the author also employs a sample of 2,183 incidents of ‘landscape manipulation and ensuing damage to the built and natural environment’ which, like the burning of big houses,Footnote ² correlates to the more violent areas of the country (pp 70–73).

In the chapter on ‘Contested spaces & militarised landscapes’, Stover's geography is not always precise, highlighting the example of Second Cork Brigade engineer Daniel Daly, who ‘used his home in Glanmore for making bombs’ (p. 39). ‘Glanmore’ appears to be an unfortunate misreading of the suburban town of Glanmire, Daly's contemporary address when supplying his statement to the Bureau of Military History in 1952. The actual location of the bomb-producing house in 1919 was Daly's family home at Bushy Park House, an elegant two-storey property built in 1820 on the River Bride and situated between the villages of Rathcormac and Watergrasshill. Daly was a member of the Watergrasshill Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) company. Bushy Park's previous occupant before it was purchased by Daly's farming parents was Richard Gifford Campion, who possessed substantial land in north-east Cork and Tipperary.Footnote ³ Stover's thoughts on I.R.A. volunteers manufacturing munitions in a modest-sized estate house would have been very welcome within the theme of ‘Contested spaces’ and its attendant symbolism. How Daly's family could come to occupy this dwelling is a phenomenon thoroughly explored by Terence Dooley's Burning the big house, which considers the political, social and economic factors that contributed to the fracturing of estates and the sale of land using the time frame of 1879 to 1923 (p. 22). Dooley's principal focus is on the aristocracy (owners of estates over 2,000 acres) and their decades long financial disengagement from the country that eviscerates the ‘myth’ that the outbreak of the First World War represented ‘the last day of Ireland's ancien regime’ (pp 3, 61). Concerning the political motivations for the burning of big houses that commenced in early 1920, along with acting as billets for crown forces such as Auxiliaries and Black and Tans, the author states baldly, ‘There is little doubt that the former landed elite provided information to the authorities: reporting and adjudicating crime was what they did’ (p. 105).

Combatants’ utilisation of Ireland's landscape is the focus of one of Stover's chapters where he records how an excess of ‘foliage and overgrowth’ in County Roscommon disrupted a round-up by the crown forces in March 1921 to such an extent that Captain Roger Grenville Peek allegedly promised to ‘return and burn every bit of brush and cover on the mountain side’. Peek, along with Lieutenant John Harold Tennant and several others, were killed at an ambush at Scramogue (pp 62–3). This ambush also features in Regina Donlon's micro-study, The burning of Knockcroghery village, Co. Roscommon, 1921 (p. 27). West of Lough Ree in County Roscommon, the village of Knockcroghery is approximately equidistant to Athlone and Roscommon Town. By the mid seventeenth century, it had acquired the name Cnoc na Chrocaire, ‘the hill of the hanging,’ in reference to the execution of the O'Ceallaigh clan during the Cromwellian conquest. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the village became known for another instrument of death: the manufacture of clay pipes (pp 8–10, 13). Donlon illustrates the impact that crown forces razing the village in 1921 had on this local industry with one in four local inhabitants directly employed in the production of duidín pipes (pp 14–16). Donlon states that the Roscommon Messenger was ‘the predominant newspaper in the area’ and that ‘the local newspapers made a sobering decision to forego extensive reporting’ on the Knockcroghery arson, suggesting this was ‘an instinctual attempt at self-protection’, with the damage previously meted out to the Athlone Printing Works informing this inaction (pp 11, 37). The Roscommon Herald of Boyle was an exception, carrying several items on the burning. Under the heading ‘Roscommon village in ruins: many residents burned out by incendiaries’, the paper chronicled the destruction of fifteen houses in the village, reporting emotively:

On the same page, the Roscommon Herald printed Joseph Devlin's provocative comments in the House of Commons, where he asked Denis Henry, attorney general for Ireland, ‘whether he was to appoint an impartial inquiry into the wholesale destruction of an Irish village before they were all burned out by the armed forces of the Crown?’Footnote ⁴ The cover of this issue included an inflammatory political cartoon that showed a member of the constabulary, dubbed ‘Carson's Special’, standing amidst the ruins of Knockcroghery carrying a revolver, tin of petrol and a cricket bat inscribed with the words ‘No Pope’. Meanwhile, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Fitzalan, looks on approvingly.Footnote ⁵ On 2 July 1921, the Roscommon Herald reprinted a piece from London paper The Nation that acknowledges the practice of destroying country estates and contended: ‘In County Roscommon, the little village of Knockcroghery has been wiped out by way of reprisal … In reprisal for reprisal, and to prevent their being used as stations for the military and Auxiliaries, one big country house after another is now being destroyed by the IRA.’Footnote ⁶ Within days, Moydrum Castle lay in ruins, burned in reprisal for the destruction of dwellings in Knockcroghery and Coosan. The image of the burned mansion features on the cover of U2's album The Unforgettable Fire, which incidentally contains the instrumental track ‘The 4^th of July’, though this is not connected to the castle's destruction (Dooley, p. 251). Donlon cites Dooley's 2022 monograph in her study (p. 62 n. 26) but there is a substantial divergence of opinion between the two regarding the motivations for the burning of Moydrum Castle. Donlon argues that Moydrum Castle was identified as a reprisal target in lieu of retaliatory attacks on the smaller homes of individual loyalists, noting the symbolic importance of the eighteenth-century mansion. Significantly, it is stated that the occupant, Lord Castlemaine, was the king's lieutenant for Westmeath and ‘had no involvement in politics and had not been involved in the war up to this point’ (p. 45). Dooley instead draws on Eugene Dunne's 2016 doctoral thesis examining the aristocracy of Westmeath, showcasing Lord Castlemaine's nuanced political history which included being a member of the nationalist-dominated Westmeath County Council, as well as being a representative peer, vice-president of the Irish Unionist Alliance and allegedly firing staff members for not joining the British army during the Great War (pp 53, 113). Dooley also points to the possibility that agrarianism informed the decision to burn Moydrum Castle and highlights continued agitation in the aftermath of the burning, including cattle maiming in December 1923 (pp 142–3). Agrarianism more broadly and the division of demense lands among local citizens is enticingly described as ‘micro social revolutions’ (p. 150).

The destruction of ‘big houses’ is addressed in the last chapter of Stover's work and is the focus of Terence Dooley's masterful study, which convincingly argues that the 1920–23 period ‘merely acted as a catalyst in an ongoing process of social and economic decline that had contributed to the sale of big houses and the dispersal of contents that went all the way back to the early 1880s’ (p. 207). Burning the big house also exhibits the alterations to the rural landscape brought about by these widespread arson attacks and other factors: a timber shortage in the aftermath of the Great War contributed to the sale of demesne woodland (pp 146, 198) and, on a smaller scale, architectural changes and the destruction of exotic plants and gardens (pp 198, 223, 231). Crucially, these houses were often major employers in their localities. Like Stover and Donlon, Dooley's work is at times highly sensory, documenting in his case study of Mitchelstown Castle, for example, the ‘gesture of disdain, defiance and provocation’ that was provided by occupying Anti-Treaty I.R.A. volunteers urinating in its opulent corridors and putting out cigarettes on the castle's carpet (pp 171–2). The castle's owner used the compensation money to build houses in the Dublin suburb of Clontarf, altering that landscape as well (p. 234). The location of Mitchelstown Co-Operative on the former castle site is an intriguing example of the recolonisation of public space in the aftermath of the revolutionary period, a concept usually applied to statues and monuments rather than buildings and landscapes (pp 281–3).

All three studies engage with compensation applications arising from this destruction in the aftermath of the revolutionary period. Importantly, Stover showcases the damage and displacement to the rural economy caused by reprisals against creameries which served a social, as well as business, function. Enduring ruin also considers the broader ‘cost’ of the Civil War, although it should come with the caveat that some contemporary newspaper estimates of damage were quite speculative (pp 99, 147, 153).Footnote ⁷ The frustrations of seeking damages from the cash-strapped Irish Free State are addressed by Dooley (pp 176–7), although this was far from an aristocratic phenomenon as shown by Regina Donlon's intimate table documenting compensation applications in Knockcroghery (p. 51). The latter also reinforces the scale of destruction visited upon the inhabitants of this Roscommon village. Likewise, Stover's insightful interpretations illuminate the spatial modifications caused by the revolutionary period and how this has altered how people interact with certain landscapes. Though Burning the big house stresses the comparative restraint of destruction against the colonial elite displayed in Ireland when placed in a transnational perspective, the damage experienced doubtlessly would have appeared excessive for those with direct experience of the flames, whether in the big house or labourer's cottage.