Abstract

LANDSCAPES 173 welcome attitude demonstrates how focusing in on patterns of prehistoric movement helps to shape and broaden the understanding of landscapes, whether this is about its origins or its structure, or to simply acknowledge the significant contribution that a knowledge of past route- ways (and movement thereof) makes in constructing a more animate past. Oscar Aldred Cambridge Archaeological Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK ora20@cam.ac.uk http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5207-7905 © 2020 Oscar Aldred https://doi.org/10.1080/14662035.2020.1770484 Religion, Landscape and Settlement in Ireland, from Patrick to Present, by Kevin Whelan, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2018, 304pp, illustrations, maps, €45 (Hbk), ISBN: 978-1-84682-3 For much of the twentieth century Ireland looked inwards, as its elected elite and its unelected super-elite – the Catholic clergy – promoted a curiously insular mix of social intolerance and cultural nostalgia. Minds were policed as if geographical borders, lest the spiritual purity of the newly independent nation-state be compromised by any secularising impulses. Much has changed, and the ancient ‘land of saints and scholars’ is now a modern, increasingly multi-cul- tural, liberal democracy. Nothing captures how Roman Catholicism has declined in impor- tance in post-millennium Ireland than the approval in January 2020 by Dublin City Council of plans to demolish