Old Map of County Sligo in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - Ballymote, Tubbercurry, Enniscrone, Rosses Point

County Sligo appears here as Samuel Lewis mapped it in 1844, one sheet from his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, a work that aimed to record every parish, barony, and market town across the country. Sligo sits in the province of Connacht on Ireland's northwest coast, a county of dramatic coastline and flat-topped mountains that Lewis's engravers rendered with the same careful attention to boundaries and place names that they gave the rest of Ireland. The map dates from the years just before the Great Famine, capturing a rural landscape of small towns and dense parish networks on the eve of enormous change.

Sligo town anchors the county on the map, with Ballymote, Tubbercurry, and Enniscrone marked as its principal market towns and Rosses Point noted on the coast where the county opens onto the Atlantic. Lough Gill, the lake celebrated in the poetry of W.B. Yeats, sits just southeast of Sligo town, while the flat summit of Benbulben rises to the north, both distinctive features of a county whose landscape has drawn writers and artists for generations. Baronies and parish divisions cover the sheet in fine engraved detail, and roads link Sligo town to Ballymote and Tubbercurry across the county's rolling farmland and coastal plain.

This print will mean the most to anyone with family from Sligo town, Ballymote, Tubbercurry, or the coast around Rosses Point, and to readers of Yeats drawn to Lough Gill and the country around it. It suits a study, hallway, or reading room, and works just as well as a gift for a relative researching Sligo ancestry or a fan of Yeats's Sligo poems. The print is reproduced at high resolution to keep Lewis's engraved detail sharp, from the smallest parish name to the shoreline at Rosses Point, and is available in several sizes.