It goes without saying that the Big House was intended to be a symbol: as more than one critic has remarked, these houses really were only “big” in comparison to the poverty of the lesser structures that surrounded them. They were to be a bastion for British and Anglo-Irish culture and a center for social and administrative interactions. In this sense, they straddled the gap between the towns of Dublin and London, whence their power came, and the villages to whom they administered: it is no coincidence that these garrisons of British power bore the brunt of Republican anger during the Troubles of 1919-1921. Examining two of the rare films to focus on the War of Independence from the perspective of rural Ireland (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach 2006, The Last September, Deborah Warner 1999) allows us to examine the representation of the Big House and its place between the Irish village and the British-ruled town. Loach’s film, which emphasizes the Socialist associations of the Anglo-Irish War and is unflinching in its portrayal of the brutality of British rule, highlights Republicans blending in to the landscape, walking from the activity of the village to the windswept hills of the countryside; the Big House, however, is reached only by (Black-and-Tan) jeep, and though landowner Sir John Hamilton may know his own servants, he fails to recognize the Republican members of the community. Deborah Warner’s The Last September takes a more clearly revisionist stance, and can be seen adding both the Irish and the British to its adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel about an Anglo-Irish family residing in the Big House of Danielstown during the war. In so doing, the Naylors become the middlemen in the struggle between the Black-and-Tans and the Republicans, once again associated respectively with town and country. In so doing, the films “mind the gap”, focusing on the Big House, so obviously present in the landscape, but which ultimately symbolizes the absence of middle ground between the two factions.