Old Map of County Wicklow in 1685 by Petty - Glendalough, Arklow, Bray

Sir William Petty published this map of County Wicklow in 1685, drawing on the Down Survey of Ireland that he had directed between 1656 and 1658, the first detailed land survey carried out on a national scale anywhere in the world. This 1685 sheet is a reduced-scale version of that original survey, condensing an enormous amount of surveying work into a single county map while still preserving much of its original detail as both a political and a physical record of Wicklow at the time. Because the underlying survey was carried out to record land ownership after the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, the map combines administrative precision with a genuinely early view of the county's towns, roads and natural features, predating by more than a century and a half the better-known Victorian county atlases that would later cover the same ground.

Wicklow is bordered on the map by the Irish Sea to the east, County Wexford to the south, County Carlow to the west and County Dublin to the north, and within those bounds it marks the Wicklow Mountains, Glendalough, Arklow, Bray and Blessington, alongside a wide scatter of smaller settlements including Roundwood, Sallygap, Shillelagh, Stratford-on-Slaney, Tinahely, Togher, Tomriland, Valleymount and Woodenbridge. Roads, bridges, rivers, lakes and forests are all set down in detail, together with the locations of castles, churches and other landmarks recorded during the original survey work, and colour is used throughout to distinguish land, water and woodland, and to pick out the county's principal towns and villages against the surrounding countryside of the Wicklow uplands.

This map suits a collector building a themed run of Irish county maps across different periods, since it offers a genuinely early view of Wicklow more than a century and a half before Samuel Lewis produced his own county atlas map of Wicklow in 1844: this Petty sheet reflects the 17th-century Down Survey era, with all of the administrative and topographical character that entails, rather than the later Victorian style of the Lewis version, so the two make a deliberately contrasting pair rather than duplicates of one another. It would also make a considered gift for anyone with family roots around Glendalough, Arklow or Blessington, or for someone marking a house move to the Wicklow Mountains. It is available unframed and in a full range of sizes, so it can be scaled to fit a hallway, a study or a larger wall.