Petty's maps, 1650s

Sir William Petty’s maps were created in 1655 and 1656 for the Government and covered the whole of Ireland. They were of two types - barony and parish maps. There were over 2,000 parish maps which showed townlands and land use. All of the parish maps were destroyed in the fires of the Dublin Custom House in 1711 and of the Public Record Office, Dublin in 1922. For many years it was believed that no copies existed but fortunately copies were made of some of these maps by Daniel O’Brien in the 1780s. These do not cover the whole country, and there are none for County Fermanagh.

The main difficulty with these maps is that only the forfeited land was measured and subdivided, not the Protestant land. However they were the first maps in the world to result from direct protractions. The lands were mapped by trained surveyors who travelled around the country and, as with the Raven maps, the area of wood, bog and profitable land was sometimes recorded.

Petty had a great interest in townland names and what they meant. He saw that the traditional Irish place-names had relevance to the surrounding land and was insistent that these were not changed to English place-names but instead simply translated into English. These anglicised townland names then became the legal spelling.

It is interesting to see how accurate some of these townland and parish boundaries were. Woods are shown on some of the maps but not many of these woods seem to have survived the intervening 350 years.

Coloured copies of these maps can be examined at the Public Record Office, Northern Ireland.