maps

maps. Irish cartography begins no earlier than the 16th century, with the advent of separate maps of Ireland. Before that, the mapping of Europe's outermost Atlantic fringe belongs to the history of other nations and other cultures, with Great Britain and Ireland taking an inconspicuous place successively in Claudius Ptolemy's Geography of the 2nd century AD, in the diagrammatic mappaemundi characteristic of early medieval Christendom, and in the sea charts produced by Italian and Iberian navigators in the 14th century and after. The latter provided the information on Ireland which appeared on the first printed maps of Great Britain and Ireland, such as Martin Waldseemüller's map of 1513.

Only after c.1540 did Ireland acquire a definite cartographic identity in the many English military and political maps that were the surveyors' and engineers' contribution to the forward policy pursued by Tudor governments. In this connection the maps of Robert Lythe (1567–71), the two John Brownes (uncle and nephew, 1583–90), Francis Jobson (1587–98), and Richard Bartlett (1601–2) are particularly notable. Many of these maps remained buried in government offices. However some, such as those by Lythe of central and southern Ireland, were used without acknowledgement in the compilations of foreign cartographers like Gerard Mercator (1564, 1595), Abraham Ortelius (1573), and Jodocus Hondius (1591), and later in the maps of the Englishman John Speed (1611), whose version of Ireland found general acceptance for much of the 17th century.

By Speed's time military campaigns had become a less important cartographic influence than the confiscation of landed property. The emphasis now was on the measurement and plotting of numerous small territorial divisions at large scales. After the Flight of the Earls in 1607 land in six Ulster counties was confiscated (see ulster plantation) and a hasty survey was made by Josias Bodley to show the divisions in which the land was to be apportioned among its new owners; in Co. Londonderry land granted to the London companies was mapped in more detail by Thomas Raven in 1622. The Down Survey, organized by Sir William Petty in the 1650s, is preeminent among these 17th‐century surveys of confiscated land. Petty's bequest to the future included not only accurate printed maps of the outline and counties of Ireland, but also a flourishing class of land surveyors who specialized in the manuscript mapping of estates and farms on behalf of their new proprietors. Estate mapping remained an Irish preoccupation even after the visit to Dublin in 1754–60 of the celebrated Anglo‐French cartographer John Rocque, who through his pupils (especially Bernard Scalé) exercised more influence in Ireland on estate surveying than on the kind of printed map that Rocque himself had specialized in. Thereafter estate maps began to reflect more closely the growing elaboration of towns, country houses, demesnes, and other artefacts in the Irish landscape, rather than the bare boundaries of the Down Survey.

The long ascendancy of Petty's county maps was gradually undermined. The Physico‐Historical Society encouraged the production of maps of Down, Kerry, Waterford, and Cork in the 1740s, and Rocque published maps of Cos. Dublin and Armagh. However, it was not until printed maps of counties received limited funding from grand juries under an act of 1774 that 25 counties were mapped at scales of between 1 and 2 inches to the Irish mile. These maps varied greatly in content and accuracy, and the high point of the genre was achieved in Bald's 25‐sheet map of Mayo, completed in 1830. However, no Irish cartographer ever equalled the magnificent town plan of Dublin which Rocque published in 1756. Lesser Irish towns were more usually mapped, if at all, as part of estate surveys, though printed maps do exist for Armagh, Belfast, Cork, Derry, Drogheda, Enniskillen, Galway, Limerick, Newry, Tralee, and Waterford.

Another generation of innovators, several of them Scotsmen or with Scottish connections, appeared in Ireland after the Union, and were especially active in the mapping of roads, canals, and harbours, exploiting new cartographic techniques and achieving new standards of accuracy. Prominent in this group were William Bald, Richard Griffith, William Duncan, and William Edgeworth. Most of them spent some time practising as independent civil engineers under central or local government control, particularly in surveys for the Irish Bogs Commission of 1809–14 and in several county maps that were by‐products of the bogs survey. Some engineers tried to apply improved standards of precision to the traditional subject‐matter of Irish estate surveying, but their efforts were overtaken in 1824 when central government took an active role in Irish cartography through the establishment of the Ordnance Survey.

Private large‐scale cartography in Ireland was stifled by Ordnance Survey competition and land surveyors largely became copyists thereafter; on the other hand, commercial publishers, mostly outside Ireland, found it profitable to reduce and restyle the survey's small‐scale work.

Bibliography

Andrews, J. H. , Plantation Acres: An Historical Study of the Irish Land Surveyor and his Maps (1985)
Andrews, J. H. Shapes of Ireland (1997)
Ferguson, Paul J. , Irish Map History: A Select Bibliography, 1850–1983, on the History of Cartography in Ireland (1983)

JHA/ and J. H. Andrews