>From the book The Irish in Philadelphia by Dennis Clark, published 1973 by Temple University (where Mr. Clark submitted a thesis from which the book was developed): pp.26-27 "One of the most important features of the social background of the emigrating Irish was its singularly rural character... .... In 1841 only one-fifth of the Irish population lived in communities that could be called towns or villages. Afte the census of 1841, the boundaries of the chief towns were enlarged to take in adjacent areas...[O]nly four cities of over 25,000 [existed] in 1841: Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Belfast. Thirteen other towns exceeded 10,000: Wexford, Carlow, Kilkenny, Dundalk, Drogheda, Armagh, Newry, Derry, Tralee, Waterford, Galway, and Sligo. These towns and sixteen others embraced 687,514 people, or 8 per cent of the 1841 total of 8,175,124...Beyond these larger centers, there were ancient market sites, pilgrimage shrines, and geographical crossroads that gathered population, but they could hardly be classified as towns. As [one] correspondent described a settlement in Galway in 1845: 'As this is the largest village I ever saw, so it is the poorest, the worst built, the most strangely irregular and the most completely without head, or center, or market, or church, or school of any village I was ever in. It is an overgrown democracy. No man is better or richer or poorer than his neighbor in it.' " pp. 39 "In the first half of the nineteenth century there were still places in Ireland where the ancient custom of Buailteachas, or transhumance, was practiced...In this practice, a man might have three dwellings - one in the mountains, where youth would care for cattle in the summer months; one upon the shore; and the third on an island, for the fishing season. These dwellings, used seasonally, must have given the families a rather casual attitude toward housing." posted by Sharon Carberry