The Walls Come Down

Abstract

This chapter discusses John Ferrar's history of Limerick which reflected on the ending of the city's final siege in 1691. It notes that the achievement of a hundred years of peace from the 1690s to the 1790s was one of the defining characteristics of eighteenth-century Ireland. The chapter then looks at the disappearance of defensive walls from most of the larger urban centers. These walls were old and by Continental standards quite tame structures, both in height and in mass. It also analyzes how both entry gates and much of the connected walling had vanished from Irish cities by 1800. In their prime, city walls had defined the intangibles of civic identity and corporate prestige. The chapter argues that the disappearance of city walls was a deliberate and often controversial process that reflected the progressive subjugation of city communities to the princely state and its military priorities. The chapter then shifts focus on to how urban defences had continued to shape military outcomes in the course of the seventeenth century — particularly the case in the northernmost city of Derry.