Old Map of County Kildare in 1685 by William Petty - Kildare, Naas, Maynooth, Castledermot, Monasterevan

Few surveys in European history were born of quite so blunt a purpose as the one behind this map of County Kildare. Sir William Petty, physician-general to Oliver Cromwell's army in Ireland, was tasked in the 1650s with measuring the forfeited lands of the island so they could be parcelled out to soldiers and financiers of the Commonwealth's Irish campaigns. The resulting Down Survey, the first systematic land survey of its kind anywhere, was later engraved into the county atlas known as Hiberniae Delineatio, published around 1685. This Kildare sheet is one of that atlas's thirty-two county plates, drawn not for pleasure but for the settlement of an entire kingdom.

On the plate itself, Naas appears as the county's ancient assembly town, long associated with the old Kings of Leinster, while Maynooth is marked as the seat of the powerful FitzGerald earls and their great riverside castle. Castledermot's monastic origins and round tower are recorded to the south, near the county's border with Carlow, and Monasterevan sits along the River Barrow in the west, close to the boglands stretching toward the Midlands. The map also traces the River Liffey as it crosses the county on its way to Dublin, alongside the wide, open expanse of the Curragh, already known in Petty's day as common grazing land and a gathering ground for troops.

This Kildare plate suits readers with a taste for Ireland's earliest cartography, for the Cromwellian settlement in particular, or for the genealogy of a county so closely tied to the FitzGerald dynasty. It is scanned and reproduced at high resolution from the original engraving, preserving Petty's fine linework and lettering, and is offered in a range of sizes. Few Irish county maps carry quite this much administrative weight behind such delicate line work.