Dean Rowland Davies, the chaplain with the Williamite forces who was last seen having his boots stolen in Clonmel, writes in his last journal entry for 30 September 1690: ‘This day the residue of our army began their march towards Kinsale; and the magistrates of Cork, resuming their places, proclaimed the King and Queen, and put the city into some order.’ After the chaos and the upheaval of war comes the hard task of securing and winning the peace, and of bringing stability back into public and private life. One view of the subsequent eighteenth century is that it is a period of relative calm and certainty, in comparison to the centuries preceding and succeeding it. For W. B. Yeats the eighteenth century was the ‘one Irish century that escaped from darkness and confusion’. It is a curious remark and, of course, it is a poet's estimation rather than a historian's. What Yeats, the artist, is attracted to in this century is the ‘image of the modern mind's discovery of itself, of its own permanent form’. His assessment suggests that the eighteenth century marks a break with the old in its embrace of the new. Yet, this does not imply that it was an easy, unproblematic transition, the headlong rush into modernity does not necessarily suggest that all of the past, all of history, is left behind and forgotten: trace elements remain to disturb and disrupt the modernisation project.