The Use of Documentary Source Material in the Northern Ireland Survey of Industrial Archaeology

Abstract

The recent emergence and general recognition of industrial archaeology as a subject of respectable academic status is a development of considerable significance, not only in the field of research and scholarship but also, through its application, in influencing the general approach, at both national and regional level, towards the problems of recording and preserving sites and structures of particular interest and importance in the industrial history of the British Isles. In the paper which follows an attempt is made to define and analyse an individual approach to the subject, with particular reference to the use of documentary source material in the survey of industrial archaeology at present being carried out in Northern Ireland. As defined by the Council for British Archaeology, industrial archaeology is 'the study of industrial monuments or other fixed structures especially of the period of the Industrial Revolution which either alone or in association with plant and equipment illustrate or are significantly associated with the beginnings and evolution of industrial and technical processes. These may be concerned with either production or communications.' Very broadly the new field of inquiry involves the study and interpretation of a wide range of material remains resulting from the efforts of man to control and exploit his environment, and to amass wealth, during a relatively short period of time, from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It combines elements which in the past have been the subject of attention of economic historians, civil and mechanical engineers, historical geographers, architects, local historians and antiquaries, railway and canal historians, as well as of archaeologists in the generally accepted sense. In the new field of industrial archaeology 1 Northern Ireland occupies a unique position. As early as I956 Dr E. R. R. Green of Manchester University, a member of the Ancient Monuments Advisory Council of Northern Ireland, and, later, Secretary of the Research Committee on Industrial Archaeology of the Council for British Archaeology, undertook a survey of the industrial archaeology of County Down, the results of which were subsequently published. This was intended to form a companion volume to the wider archaeological survey of the county, in course of preparation, and was the first regional survey of industrial archaeology to be completed and published.2