The interconnection between town and country is the central theme in this volume. It is based on a seminar held in 2021 where contributors used and compared historic town atlases to understand how the urban landscape interacted with its suburban surroundings and rural hinterland through time. Four essays focus on Ireland, looking at the enduring and complex relationships between the urban and the rural from monastic times through to the nineteenth century. More broadly, an introduction (by Michael Potterton) gives the international context and a concluding essay (by Chris Dyer) discusses the study of town and country as two very complementary fields of research.