Mapping Ireland

The earliest known printed map of Ireland was an Italian woodcut produced in 1528, and it was followed by a series of crude maps printed in Rome and Venice around the 1560s. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Tudor conquest of Ireland extended British rule beyond the Pale and across the rest of Ireland. The mapping of Ireland became an instrument of conquest when British cartographers, following in the wake of their conquering armies, began to draw regional maps of territories declared forfeit to the British crown and intended for plantation. The culminations of these bloody land acquisitions were the brutal campaigns of Oliver Cromwell in the 1659s. He laid waste much of Ireland and banished what remained of the native ruling classes to the barren lands of the west, 'To Hell or to Connacht'. In the aftermath of Cromwell's campaigns the Physician-General of the British army in Ireland, William Petty, was charged with recording all the land forfeited by the Irish.
Equipped with the most up to date instruments, and with the help of more than a thousand surveyors and clerks, Petty produced the definitive 'Down survey' (so called because all measurements taken in the field were immediately written down on site for greater accuracy). These maps remain visually correct to this day.