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The Absentee Landlord's Landscape: The Watson-Wentworth Estate in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract The Watson-Wentworths, ambitious eighteenth-century estate builders and landscape improvers, whose home estate was at Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire, were also the owners of an estate of 37,000 ha in Ireland, mainly in County Wicklow, originally acquired by the Earl of Strafford, Lord Deputy of Ireland, between 1633 and 1640. The management and administration of the Watson-Wentworth Irish properties in the first half of the eighteenth century are exceptionally well-documented. This documentary evidence enables a detailed analysis to be made of the working of an absentee landlord's estate during a critical period of its development and the ways in which its resources were being exploited and its landscape transformed. Set in the context of the revisionist historiography of eighteenth-century Ireland, the article explores the impact of environmental and political factors, leasing policy, and the roles of landlord, resident agent and tenantry in encouraging and impeding estate development and landscape change.