Irish Archaeological Research Digital Magazine

Figure 3: Bodley map
Bartlett was a lieutenant serving under Lord Mountjoy, who had distinguished himself as a capable
cartographer – a rare thing indeed. Bartlett provides a measure of the situation at the time; a
talented cartographer who was discovered among the soldiery and put to work. No cartographers
of the day were volunteering to confront the difficult working conditions of Ireland, and many reports
agree on the general shortage of competent map-makers at the time. The fact that this shortage
was due in part to the hostility of the land is reinforced by the manner in which Bartlett met his end,
when, on a survey of Donegal, he was beheaded by the locals in an act of defiance to the new
king.
Sir Josias Bodley led the survey of Ulster for James I; Bodley was a military engineer who had
served in the war against the O’Neill. He produced a collection of maps c.1609, intended to be a
more accurate and comprehensive survey of the escheated counties than anything that had gone
before, thus delivering to the king the true value of lands forfeited to the crown by the rebellious
natives. The surviving maps cover counties Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh and Cavan, with parts of
Londonderry and Louth. Previous surveys had underestimated the acreage of these lands by up to
two-thirds, so Bodley must have won the king’s favour when he delivered his results.
The Bodley maps were produced by a team of six ‘surveyors’, who, rather than doing any physical
topographical survey, conducted a guided walk-over of all the forfeited lands and produced written
descriptions of all the necessary information. As his guides were local people, many of the place
names recorded were in Gaelic form and in some areas cannot be easily identified with modern
equivalents. This was then used to draw a plot of townlands and land-use, with barony boundaries
and rivers, but omitting unproductive land such as mountains and bogs, and lands not forfeit or
belonging to the church [Figure 3].
An inevitable consequence of the surveying method was that directional information was given in
relative terms rather than compass points, meaning that in some cases the maps were drawn in
mirror-image to the true lie of the land; in the past this has been dismissed as a printer’s error, but
this would be impossible given the need to annotate the maps after printing when the mistake
would surely have been discovered. It would be interesting to know if this mistake, where it occurred
at several points across the survey, was linked with the same member of the survey team,
but this is not recorded.
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