The recent flowering of local history publications is evidence of a growing interest inwriting and reading about the local past. Unusually, an improvement in quality has accompanied the increase in quantity, especially in the methodology of much of this writing. Part of this improvement is an increasing awareness of the need to study what Raymond Gillespie has described as 'communities of interest'. Many local historians are now looking beyond traditional topics like the parish or landed family towards a variety of other communities and a welcome diversity of publications about many different kinds of local community has been the result. This book, for instance, is one of two recent publications in which examples of the peculiarly Irish land and social unit known as the townland - over 62,000 of which were recorded in the first Ordnance Survey maps - are explored by a group of local historians. (The other is Paul Connell, Denis A. Cronin and Brian O Dalaigh (eds.), Irish Toumlands: Studies in Local History(Dublin, 1998).