Old Map of County Wicklow in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - Bray, Arklow, Glendalough, Topographical Dictionary Edition

This map of County Wicklow was engraved in 1844 for the county atlas accompanying Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, first published in 1837. Lewis's London-based publishing house aimed to catalogue every county, barony and parish in the country in exhaustive detail, and the matching county maps let readers locate the places named in the text. This sheet presents Wicklow in the final years before the Great Famine, recording a county already known for its mountain scenery, monastic ruins and mineral wealth.

Bray, a coastal town with origins traced to around 1198, sits at the northern edge of the sheet, on its way to becoming one of Ireland's best-known seaside towns later in the Victorian era. Arklow, dating from around 795 and among the oldest settlements in Ireland, is marked at the mouth of the River Avoca, while Baltinglass, recorded from around 700, lies inland near the ruins of its twelfth-century abbey. Blessington, established by 1667 close to what are now the Blessington Lakes, sits at the edge of the Wicklow Mountains, and Glendalough, with its monastic settlement founded in the sixth century, marks the county's most historic valley. Rathdrum and the newer settlement of Greystones, only recently established when this map was drawn, appear along the coast and inland routes, while the map's mountainous interior takes in the old Avoca copper mines and the country around the Powerscourt estate and its waterfall.

This is the Victorian county-atlas view of Wicklow, drawn for Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1844 and quite different in character from the earlier Down Survey-era depiction of the county produced by Sir William Petty in 1685; where that seventeenth-century plate reflects the baronies and land records of the Cromwellian settlement, this later sheet shows a nineteenth-century county already shaped by tourism, mining and improved roads. It makes a fitting gift for a collector building a set of Wicklow maps across different centuries, or for anyone with family ties to Bray, Arklow or the villages around Glendalough. The print is available unframed and in a full range of sizes, suited to anywhere from a small study to a larger family room.