Epilogue : Landscapes and architecture: the Cork & Bandon railway today

摘要

It is a truism that before humans set foot in\udIreland there was land, water, and nature. In a similar way, before \udrailways were planned and built in the nineteenth century,\udthere were hills and valleys, rivers, forests, as well as the hallmarks of centuries of human activity: roads \udsmall and large, villages, and towns, woven together by centuries-old economic and social ties.\udThis human activity was at every stage \udaffected by the landscape\ud: rivers dictated settlement patterns, and mountains separated communities. In \udtime this relationship was inverted\udas the landscape was \udin turn\udaltered by streams diverted to power\udmills, forests felled and cut up, \udestates\udplanned\ud, and so on. \udThe railways continued this process of reforming the rural landscape, and the new specifications so characteristic of the engineering of the period–gradient and curvature–necessitated bolder and more magnificent disturbances of the natural \udenvironment. [First paragraph]