Old Map of County Fermanagh in 1685 by William Petty - Enniskillen, Castle Coole, Crom Estate, Florence Court, Lough Erne
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By the time Sir William Petty's Irish county maps reached print in 1685, the fieldwork behind them was already three decades old. Petty had directed the Down Survey of the 1650s, an extraordinarily ambitious effort to measure the forfeited lands of Ireland parish by parish so that Cromwell's soldiers and creditors could be paid in acreage rather than coin. His heirs later gathered the surviving county drawings into the atlas Hiberniae Delineatio, and the Fermanagh plate offered here is one of its thirty-two sheets, rendering a county then still recovering from decades of plantation and war.
The plate centres on Enniskillen, built on its island between the two great expanses of Lough Erne and long the stronghold of the Maguire chieftains before it passed to English and Scottish settlers. To its south-east lie the lands of Castle Coole and Florence Court, estates whose grand houses would not rise until the following century but whose townlands and boundaries were already fixed on Petty's survey, and to the north the shoreline of Crom Estate looks out over Upper Lough Erne, a stretch of water it would help defend during the sieges of the Williamite war just a few years after this map's publication. Lough Erne itself, divided into its upper and lower basins and scattered with wooded islands, dominates the whole sheet.
Anyone researching the plantation of Ulster, the Maguire lordship, or the deep history of Fermanagh's great estates will find this plate a useful starting point. It is reproduced from a high-resolution scan of the original engraving and is available in a range of sizes. Few maps compress quite so much turbulent history into a single county outline.
