Abstract

Before the Ordnance Survey undertook the mapping of the country from Malin to Mizzen in the 1830s, cartography, surveying and landscape map production in Ireland were essentially a private undertakings. There had been a seventeenth-century precedent for state involvement in mapping in the various plantation surveys, but after Sir William Petty's Down Survey and the more or less final allocation of landed estates in the 1690s, there was no more central goverment involvement. Throughout the eighteenth century, competition in an expanding market for estate surveys produced a flowering of cartographic enterprise which has added considerably to our understanding of prefamine social and economic development.