Clare Island Survey 



5. 

 AGRICULTURE AND ITS HISTORY. 



By JAMES WILSON, M.A., 



Professor of Agriculture in the Eoyal College of Science for Ireland. 



Read February 27. Published May 3, 1911. 



No account of the agriculture of any small or even of any large island could 

 be written without discussing that of the other places with which it may 

 have been in contact. English agriculture, for instance, although it is largely 

 the outcome of the system the English people brought with them to Britain, 

 cannot be fully described without reference to ancient Home, to early Scandi- 

 navia and France, and to the Low Countries in the times of Elizabeth and 

 the Stuarts. The following paper will be found to contain less about 

 Clare Island and more about the mainlands of Ireland and Great Britain 

 than might ordinarily have been expected. But the circumstances here 

 are not ordinary. Clare Island could not have been treated as the Survey 

 scheme intended it should be, without reference to the mainlands; and, as no 

 systematic and searching history of Irish or British Agriculture has yet been 

 written, it became necessary to deal with this part of the inquiry at some 

 length. What appears here must be regarded, therefore, as pioneer work 

 in a field which is largely unexplored; and some of the views brought 

 forward may have to be modified by further research. For instance : since 

 this paper was read, discussions with students of philology and archaeology 

 have brought out divergent views as to the dates when certain crops may 

 have been cultivated by the Irish Celts ; and so that these views may stand 

 alongside those expressed in the paper they are put in as notes. 



From the historical point of view, Clare Island by itself is well-nigh 

 sterile. The live stock of the island have been so changed by the importations 

 of the Congested Districts Board that the signs which would indicate those 

 of even five-and- twenty years ago are very few. And, such as they are, these 

 indicate that the stock of that time were themselves the descendants of 

 stock brought to the island after the sixteenth century to sweep out a still 

 earlier stock. In the same way, the system of farming has been changed in 



B.I. A. FKOU., VO.L. XXXI. A 5 



