For 700 years the Ascendancy dominated Ireland: landlords built their great houses, landscaped their parks and spent wealth gathered from rents, before disappearing in the 20th century. Making use of letters, diaries, memoirs, estate documents, inventories, travellers' tales and family reminiscences, Peter Somerville-Large examines the lifestyle of the so-called rural sovereigns, describing the elegance, discomfort, and danger associated with castle and mansion, and the lives of many famous figures who created or inhabited the great houses.