Old Map of Connacht in 1685 by Sir William Petty - Galway, Sligo, Roscommon

This map of the province of Connacht was published in 1685 by Sir William Petty, an English surgeon, scientist and statistician who had earlier led the Down Survey of Ireland between 1656 and 1658. That survey was the first attempt anywhere in the world to measure an entire country's land on a parish-by-parish basis, undertaken so that estates confiscated from Irish Catholic landowners after the Cromwellian wars could be redistributed to English and Scottish settlers. Petty later drew on the barony maps produced by his surveyors to compile printed county and provincial maps such as this one, giving the Down Survey's administrative records a wider, more durable audience among landowners, officials and scholars back in England.

The plate covers the whole of Connacht, taking in the five counties of Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon and Sligo as they were defined in the late seventeenth century. Following the conventions of the Down Survey, it marks the roads, bridges, rivers, lakes, hills and forests that shaped travel and settlement across the province, along with the towns, bishopricks and archbishopricks that structured both civil and church administration at the time. The map sits against a backdrop of real upheaval in the region: Galway city endured a prolonged siege in 1651 during the Cromwellian conquest, and the wider province would see further conflict just a few years after this map was printed, at the Battle of Aughrim in 1691, one of the last major battles fought on Irish soil.

For a collector already gathering Down Survey-era maps of Ireland's other provinces, this Connacht sheet is a natural addition to the set, standing alongside Petty's plates for Leinster, Munster and Ulster. It also makes a considered gift for anyone researching family history in Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon or Leitrim, giving them a sense of how their ancestral counties were recorded on paper only a few decades after the land itself changed hands. The print is supplied unframed and offered across a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format print for a study or office wall.