Old Map of County Clare in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - Ennis, Kilrush, Kilkee, Lahinch, Loop Head

This map of County Clare was engraved in 1844 as one of the county sheets issued with Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland. Lewis's London firm spent the 1830s and 1840s cataloguing Ireland parish by parish, and the maps that accompanied the dictionary were drawn to a consistent house style: clear lettering, carefully marked barony boundaries, and the roads, rivers and settlements of each county recorded without decorative flourish. The Clare sheet captures the county in the final years before the Great Famine, when its towns and townlands were more heavily populated than they would be for a century afterwards.

Ennis, the county town, sits at the centre of the sheet on the River Fergus, its medieval friary and narrow streets already centuries old when the map was made. Kilrush appears as a busy trading port on the Shannon Estuary, with Kildysart and O'Briensbridge marking quieter stretches of the river. Along the Atlantic coast the map records Kilkee and Lahinch, both then emerging as seaside resorts, together with Miltown Malbay and the long finger of the Loop Head peninsula. To the north, the limestone country of the Burren surrounds Corofin and Kilfenora, the small cathedral village known as the City of the Crosses, while Quin and its ruined abbey, Sixmilebridge, Newmarket-on-Fergus and Tulla fill the east of the county. Scariff, Mountshannon and Whitegate line the shore of Lough Derg.

This is the third map of Clare in our collection and the most detailed: where Petty's 1685 survey and Blaeu's 1665 map of Munster show the county as the seventeenth century knew it, Lewis records the roads, baronies and villages of the 1840s. That makes it a natural choice for anyone tracing Clare ancestry — a great many families around the world descend from the pre-Famine parishes shown here — and a thoughtful birthday, housewarming or anniversary gift for someone with roots in Ennis or the west coast. The map is printed unframed on quality paper stock and is available in nine sizes, from 16x20 inches up to A0.