Through personal and domestic circumstances I have made many visits to Belfast in the last twenty years or so. I want to take this early opportunity to record my thanks to my mother and father-in-law, and indeed to all my contacts in Northern Ireland for making me feel so welcome. Whilst in Belfast I often took the opportunity to use Queen's University Library. I can commend the marvellous collection of nineteenth-century parliamentary papers held there. This was my initial entry into Irish agricultural history, along with my extraction of material from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland which was concerned with the County Down livestock census of 1803. I shall always be grateful to Peter Roebuck for alerting me to the existence of this material. This research also allowed me to become familiar with the abundant annual agricultural census material which was collected from the late 1840s which now form the main data on which this present study is based.

A more deeply rooted connection with Ireland is literally a matter of roots. My mother came from Achill Island, a remote Atlantic island connected to its administrative county of Mayo by a causeway. She was born into an impoverished family in 1913, one of eight children. This study of Irish history inevitably took on a personal meaning.

The whole exercise has illuminated the value of inter-disciplinary cooperation. I have relied upon the expertise and good advice from many disparate areas – geography, economics, history, computing, economic history, and even geology.