Church and settlement in Ireland, based on a thematic conference held in early 2015, explores the relationship between religious sites and the landscapes in which they are located. The opening essay by James Schryver examines the process by which the prominent landscapes of pre-Christian Ireland were Christianised or were replaced by new centres of power. Essays by Gill Boazman and Tomás Ó Carragáin examine the relationship between early ecclesiastical sites and their secular neighbours. Boazman examines early medieval settlement in Rosscarbery, County Cork and Faughart, County Louth, where she identifies zones of exclusion around church sites in which secular settlement was not permitted. There were dense concentrations of ringforts outside of these exclusion zones. She suggests that these zones could represent an area worked by unfree labourers of the ecclesiastical site. Ó Carragáin's well-illustrated essay focuses on Mag Réta in County Laois. Here church sites were located close to the main royal sites suggesting a connection between the ruler and the newly-established religion. However, this connection seems to have hindered the growth of the ecclesiastical sites, with those located further away from royal sites coming more prominent over time. He also draws attention to the large number of lesser churches established within and without the ecclesiastical estates arguing that it indicates the importance of lesser proprietors in the establishment and maintenance of churches.

Paul MacCotter asks what was the geographical structure of the parochial and/or diocesan system in Ireland from the seventh to the early-fourteenth centuries? Rejecting the traditional view that the church was organised around a series of large monasteries ruled over by an abbot, ‘with the episcopacy reduced to virtual irrelevance’, he argues that before the reforming synods the church was organised around a series of paruchia, with both resident abbots and bishops. These dioceses controlled lands both in their immediate vicinity and other dispersed territories around the island of Ireland. As part of the twelfth-century reform of the church the geographic extent of the dioceses was largely rationalised and their exclave parishes often absorbed into their adjacent diocese.

Anne-Julie Lafaye discusses contrasting mendicant foundations in Drogheda, County Louth, and in Kilcrea, County Cork. Her discussion of the role of the mendicant orders in the development of towns is well-illustrated with town plans marking the extent of the town and the location of religious foundation. Tracy Collins examines the location of nunneries in the Irish landscape to ascertain whether they corresponded to the isolated location of nunneries in England or if they have a different siting preference. The only negative is the absence of illustrations apart from a single map.

In discussing the settlement hierarchy that had developed on Mellifont Abbey's monastic estate by the sixteenth century, Geraldine Stout argues that these settlements differed from those on secular lands as they were not generally associated with castles. The diversity of settlement types (five in all) identified by Stout is at odds with the models for later medieval settlement advanced in the 1980s when the subject was really in its infancy, and models of manorial organisation emphasised the castle and church as a central feature of each settlement. The only quibble is her emphasis on the military role of the castle in the settlement; while this might not have been required on a monastic estate, the role of the castle in the administration of the manor (legal and financial) must have been continued in these manors, although perhaps in a different type of building.

David Fleming's essay on the mass rock in eighteenth-century Ireland finds no factual basis for the myth of priests secretly saying mass in the outdoors at mass rocks. It was, he argues, Fr Michael John Brenan's Ecclesiastical history of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1840), which first developed the mass rock narrative, which was subsequently incorporated into the history curriculum of the new state, and was increasingly ‘shaped by nationalistic fervour’. The folklore commission of 1937–8 showed how many school-goers were familiar with the narrative of the mass rock. In the second half of the twentieth century these sites attracted large numbers particularly during church celebrations in the jubilee years of 1950, 1979 and 2000.

Finbar McCormick's paper on mass houses and meeting houses focuses on the identification of mass houses and the form of both mass houses and meeting houses rather than their place within the eighteenth-century settlements in which they were located. This places the paper slightly out of kilter with the rest of the volume, but is perhaps a reflection of the fact that very little research has been conducted on the morphology of these structures.

There are a number of other papers which fit even less comfortably with the title of the book. Although they deal with ecclesiastical themes, they make little or no reference to settlement: Lahney Preston-Matto's interesting article focuses on the fostering of children by early medieval saints and the benefit to the saint of such a relationship; Brian Ó Broin examines how saints’ lives were narrated in order to better understand how to date. While these papers are useful to those studying the relationship between churches and settlements, they do not deal with that issue explicitly.

The dust jacket, which reproduces a section of the ‘View of the seven churches with a procession of Catholics at Christmas’ by Peter Van Lerberghe, raises expectations for the level of illustration of the volume, which apart from a number of notable exceptions (Lafaye, Stout, McCormick, Ó Carragáin) were not met. The inclusion of papers covering the fifth to the nineteenth centuries allows the reader to consider the longue durée of the connection between church and settlement in Ireland. The church needed a congregation to support it, whether that congregation lived in dispersed or nucleated settlement. The authors and editors are to be congratulated for the compilation of a collection of well-researched and articulate essays and it is sure to be of a reference book for those with an interest in the archaeology, history and historical geography of the church in Ireland.