Old Map of County Tyrone in 1685 by Sir William Petty - Strabane, Omagh, Sperrin Mountains, Lough Neagh

Land in County Tyrone changed hands by force through much of the seventeenth century, and Sir William Petty's survey was built to record exactly who held what afterward. Commissioned to measure the estates confiscated following the rebellion of 1641, Petty's teams carried out what became known as the Down Survey between 1655 and 1656, working county by county across Ireland. Nearly three decades later, in 1685, Petty drew on that survey along with older material to publish Hiberniae Delineatio, the first printed atlas of Ireland and the first instance anywhere in Europe of a country mapped in full from an actual measured survey.

Strabane sits on the map where the River Mourne meets the Foyle, a town largely built up by settlers during the Ulster Plantation earlier in the century. Omagh, marked as the county town, occupies the point where the Camowen and Drumragh rivers join to form the Strule. The Sperrin Mountains rise across the county's northern reaches, the kind of high, boggy ground that Petty's surveyors classified as unprofitable when tallying the value of confiscated land. Lough Neagh, the largest lake in these islands, touches the county's eastern edge, shared on the map with the neighbouring counties around its shore.

Those researching Ulster-Scots or planter ancestry in Tyrone, or with an interest in the Cromwellian land settlement more broadly, will find the county much as Petty's surveyors first measured it, and a meaningful gift for anyone tracing that lineage. This print is scanned at high resolution from the 1685 original and supplied unframed in a full range of sizes.