The preceding passage, an apparently innocuous part of a letter from an English settler in Ulster, provides a telling account of the way in which landscape and land use served as a focus for cultural difference in Tudor Ireland. For the English, cultivated fields and enclosed grounds were the sine qua non of civilized society. In fact, much of the work that follows aims to demonstrate the various ways in which English officials sought to transform the disordered land of Ireland and the wildehirrishemen that inhabited it through the introduction of agriculture, trade, and the civil life associated with counties and walled towns.