Volume II brings together the first six towns of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas series, previously published as individual fascicles. These towns - Maynooth, Downpatrick, Kilkenny, Bray, Fethard, and Trim - illustrate characteristic periods of town formation in Ireland. Maps are presented in large format and include facsimiles of old plans, historical reconstructions and thematic maps. Topographical views, illustrations, and photographs provide additional artistic perspectives. Each town/city in Volume II includes a text section with an explanatory essay and a detailed gazetteer that gives...

Number 8 in the Irish Historic Towns Atlas series, Downpatrick traces the history of this monastic town through its cartographic and primary sources from earliest times to c. 1900. The fascicle contains Ordnance Survey and historical maps as well as historic and aerial photographs. An essay describes the topographical evolution of Downpatrick and a gazetteer, or topographical information, includes histories of over 500 sites in the town. These atlases illustrate characteristic periods of town formation in Ireland and reflect the country's cultural identity through the town's topographical...

"An alien spaceship crash landed in my playground today"

For one primary school in England, this was not an ordinary day. It was a fabulous day of inspiration, writing, drawing, discovering and learning for the pupils, the staff and the parents. But the best thing of all? The only truly out of the ordinary thing was the alien spaceship.

So how do you make creativity a more everyday part of primary teaching? Teachers and trainees agree that creativity is a fabulous thing. But to get creative approaches into everyday teaching, you need to...

Inspired by a remark of Seamus Heaney, Lifesaving Poems began life as notebook, then a blog. How many poems, Heaney wondered, was it possible to recall responding to, over a lifetime? Was it ten, he asked, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more? Lifesaving Poems is a way of trying to answer that question. Giving himself the constraint of choosing no more than one poem per poet, Anthony began copying poems out, one at a time, as it were for safekeeping. He asked himself: was the poem one he could recall being moved by the moment he first read it? And: could he live without it? Then he posted each...