| Summary: | square n Along the Cape Shore, the fragmentation of ancestral farm units by the second and subsequent generations was primarily a funstion of the growing emphasis on commercial fishing accompanied by an increasingly subsistent agri- culture. As agriculture became more subsistent Cape Shore Irish families required less land, but could fish more efficiently by living close to the beach and to other members of the fishing crew. Population expansion was not accompanied by a spread of settlement inland, but by the formation of a loose house cluster aournd the ancestral farmstead. This pattern of land succession and settlement is similar to that of the native Irish [i] clachan.[i] The only evidence of an orderly arrangement of houses is in Branch and, in one or two cases, in St Brides, where dwellings were disposed linearly or grouped compactly around an open space. It is difficult to say if the word "square" originally referred to the lay-out pattern of the kin-group clusters in these settlements. Certainly not all of the clusters currently called "squares" have a regular, compact morphology. St Brides and Branch are the only settlements on the Cape Shore where several nuclear families orginally settled, and several kin-group clusters have evolved; this may be an in important factor in the introduction and use of the term. It is even more difficult to decide whether the compact morphology of the "square" is an inheritance from Ireland (a modification of the street-village, the Anglo- Norman cluster, or even the landlord town), is derveid from some Newfoundland (over) [reverse] source, or had independently evolved [i] in situ [i]. In Ireland the word "square" is widely used to refer to an open space, in town or city, surroudn by buildings. The area is often a market or shopping centre, but may be purely residential. There is no record of the term being used in Ireland to describe any type of rural settlement, and it is likely that it first appeared with the improving landlords who planned so many of the towns. The ...
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