Not Seeing the Woods for the Words: the Bilingual Landscape and Language of Cill Chaise/Kilcash

Abstract: Eighteenth-century Ireland was well-toured by many distinguished travel writers, yet many of them remained strangely silent about language, surely one of the most significant, if intangible, attributes of any human environment. Did these travelers ever think of their deficiencies in understanding the Irish language, sometimes the only language spoken by a majority of a locality's population? Were bilingualism and its communicative advantages and disadvantages at all present in their books and letters? The early nineteenth-century plan and poem of Tipperary's Cill Chaise/Kilcash evoke the bilingual language and landscape of early nineteenth-century Ireland, before both were axed over the course of the romantic era. Together they demonstrate how a landscape may be described and voiced in two ways and how each decodes the other by means of a conjoined history.