An increasing amount of information is available about the organisation and functioning of Gaelic society, especially in the crucial area of landholding, its legal basis and the way in which inheritance and tenurial systems operated. In spite of these growing insights, there is still very fragmentary knowledge about the spatial organisation of Gaelic society. It is generally accepted that the landscape legacy of small territorial divisions (townlands), and the documentary legacy of numerous extinct denominations, are indicative of an apparently systematic and comparatively uniform territorial organisation. Its exact function and nature are still unclear, however, and there are seeming inconsistencies in some views of a highly developed territorial system on the one hand and a socially mobile and fluid population on the other.