Despite some success, Bellew's grandiose plans to create a Utopian rural idyll on his Galway estates were thwarted as his tenants gradually became less amenable to participation in what their landlord deemed an experiment. The manner of local protest testified to the intensifying militancy among the rural population: from the classic food riot in July 1783, agrarian discontent escalated to the extent of fostering the ruthless violence of Connacht Ribbonism in the 1820s. This study portrays the Mount Bellew estate as a microcosm of a deferential world that crumbled, despite the landlord's attempts to preserve the old order.