John Speed’s Map of 1611

A Map of the County of Cork, Part 3

This is the last part (links to Parts 1 and 2 at the end of the post) and I will use it to look at where most people seemed to be living – along the River Lee and the Blackwater/Bride Rivers. Cork is shown, as we know it was and still is, on an island, as a substantial walled town with four towers. Two of the towers guard bridges and are ports of entry, and two guard inlets of the river. There’s a cross in the middle and five buildings outside the walls. 

The buildings to the left of the city (remember, that’s North) are labelled Mogelle, F:barro and M:nellan, while to the right (south) the upper building is unlabelled and the lower one is C:Tanboy?

To see what this is all about, let’s take a look at the earliest map of Cork City, which I showed you in my post Mapping West Cork, Part 2: John Speed. I reproduce that map here. It dates from 1611/12. As I said in the John Speed post, while Speed seems to have based his land maps on earlier work by Mercator . . .

. . . the city maps were all new and it seems that Speed, with one of his sons, actually travelled to the cities he includes in his atlas and paced out the distances, drawing the maps based on these calculations. They are a unique and invaluable record of a time when Ireland had walled cities, especially given that so few intact stretches of those walls remain.

And there is the Market Cross! While that is the only feature inside the city on our map, Speed’s is beautifully detailed, and he provides a key to all important buildings. There are many churches, only two of which, Christ Church and St Francis’s Church, are within the walls. Assuming that Finbarr’s church is labelled F:barro on our Map (although the brown rectangle looks more like a tower house) and St Barrie’s Church on Speed’s, it is shown in different places. St Augustine’s or St Stephen’s may be the uppermost building to the right of the city, but what is the brown pyramid-shaped blob labelled C:Tanboy? Perhaps a true Cork historian can help us out here and figure out what’s what.

Interestingly, there is no sign, on our map, of the large star-shaped fort that Speed labels The New Fort and that subsequently became known as Elizabeth Fort. It was started in 1601 by George Carew (the original owner of this map collection) built of earth, stone and timber.  This supports a pre-1600 date for this map. Elizabeth Fort is still very much part of the Cork landscape, with its massive walls still dominating the south side of the river (above).

As we progress west along the Lee, the land is shown as wooded and there are several establishments by the river and its tributaries. I recognise Kilcrea Castle and Abbey (given here as Kileroye), but I’m sure others, more familiar with this landscape than I am, can add more.

Cork Harbour, as might be expected, has many towers, the main one among them still standing is Barry’s Court (barris courte), soon (we hope) to be re-opened for visitors and also Belvelly (B:vyle), magnificently restored by a private owner. Corkbeg Island and Castle are shown, as well as several other castles on either side of the delta. Cloyne is of course indicated, as it was an important ecclesiastical centre.

Moving now to the Blackwater/Bride River system, we see perhaps as populous and encastellated an area as around Cork, especially along the two rivers, which were navigable for many miles inland. Youghal is shown as a walled town, guarding the mouth of the harbour but also a large commercial and trading centre.

We have written about Youghal before, and specifically about its well-preserved stretches of wall – an unusual feature of Irish towns as very few medieval walls have survived.

I am reproducing below the map from Pacata Hibernia I used in my Youghal’s Walls post. As with Cork, it can help us to understand a bit more about Youghal. Note, for example, the South Abbey clearly shown outside the walls on both maps.

Upriver is Strancally Castle – not the more modern manor house, but the original tower house of which only a vestige remains down by the river. Also easily discernible is Pilltown in modern-day Waterford and Inchiquin, a townland east of Youghal. Inchiquin Castle is now the ruins of a round Anglo-Norman masonry tower which went through tortuous changes of ownership but was eventually occupied by in the fabled  Countess of Desmond who in 1604 died at the age of 140 by falling out of an apple tree. The castle was then seized by Richard Boyle, Great Earl of Cork, who, along with Walter Raleigh, is closely associated with Youghal and the Blackwater River. The drawing of Inchiquin below is by James Healy from his marvellous book The Castles of County Cork.

Boyle’s Castle (it’s still there) was in Lismore, but at this point lesse more is shown as a church on the banks of the Blackwater, not the centre of power it became with Boyle’s ascendance.

Castles, towns and churches line the Bride and the Blackwater, showing how important these rivers were at a time when the best way to traverse the country was by water.

I’m going to leave it there, although I just might come back to this map at some point in the future because, well, it’s so darn interesting and it’s fun to try and puzzle out the names. I hope I have supported my thesis that this map must date to before 1600. It is most likely another of those made for the purposes of identifying property in order to confiscate and carve it up during the Plantation of Munster. Please do visit it for yourself and see what you can find – additions always welcome in the comments section below.

OK – one last image – the source of the Blackwater is shown in this one. What do we call these mountains now?

A Map of the County of Cork, Part 1

A Map of the County of Cork, Part 2

The Magic of Old Maps

We’ve done quite a few posts over the years about old maps – we are both fascinated by them. So I’ve decided to draw all those posts together into a new Menu Page, so you can easily find any post you’re interested in.

Several posts went into detail about maps from the Elizabethan period. The Elizabethans were map-makers and they had a special interest in drawing up maps of Ireland – to confiscate tracts of land from the rebellious Irish and assign them to colonisers. Jobson was the cartographer who mapped Munster: two posts detail the maps drawn up for that purpose.

There’s a mysterious map in the British Public Record office – nobody knows who did it, but it was obviously done in the period following the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. While some of the elements are obvious, others are not, and pouring over a map like this raises as many questions as it answers. I titled the two posts Elizabethan Map of a Turbulent West Cork.

Two posts, Mapping West Cork, drew on maps from the David Rumsay Map Collection – a man who has done the world a great service by collecting and digitising maps from all over the world. These are very early maps by famous cartographers Mercator (done in the late 1500s) and Blaeu (from his 1655 Atlas). I’ve updated this post recently.

John Speed’s map, dating to 1611, although largely based on Mercator’s work, is more detailed and adds all kinds of interesting details about people and cities.

Robert’s post Roaringwater Bay in 1612 is about the Dutch Pirate Map. As he says in his post:     The thing that sets the 1612 map apart, however, is that it was made in secret, and largely from surveys only carried out at sea. Also, it was specifically intended to enable a Dutch fleet to assail the pirate strongholds which became numerous around the area from Baltimore to Crookhaven, centred on Roaringwater Bay and ideal for forays into the wider Atlantic trade routes.

A series of three posts, all written by Robert, explored the world of the Down Survey – conducted by William Petty under the instructions of Oliver Cromwell, and like the Jobson maps, done for the purposes of assigning land to colonisers. 

After an introductory post, Robert went into details about West Cork and then, in a third post, looked at Kerry. He is planning more in this series.

Finally, there’s Griffith’s Valuation – a series of detailed maps done by Sir Richard Griffith in the 19th century for the purpose of putting values on every square perch of land. Robert wrote about Griffith in The Rocky Road to Nowhere, and I used the Valuation in my post What the Forest Was Hiding.

We will update The Magic of Old Maps page as we write any new posts. I am leaving you with a new map – it’s the joint work of Robert and Peter Clarke, and the original hangs in the Bank House, Ballydehob’s Tourist Information Centre.

If you want to browse the David Rumsey map collection for yourself, it’s here.

Mapping West Cork, Part 2: John Speed

John Speed was one of the greatest of Britain’s map-makers, but it is unclear how much actual original cartography he did. Much of the information in his maps appears to be based on Mercator’s maps, which we featured in Mapping West Cork, Part 1. What does appear to be original, as there are no previous records of them, are the city maps, so we can be reasonably sure that these were done from his own calculations – laid out by paces rather than by measuring implements.

Who was John Speed? Born in 1551, he trained as a tailor but his passion was for maps and he finally worked his way into a full time position as a historian and geographer, even being allocated a room for his research by Queen Elizabeth I.

His magnum opus was The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, published in 1611 and 12. This marks them as later than Mercator’s maps, but earlier than Joan Blaeu’s (see Part 1).  They were also drawn with the collaboration of Iodicus Hondius, who had drawn Mercator’s, which also explains the similarities to Mercator’s maps.

The edition of Speed’s atlas that is most often referenced is the one published in 1676, and that is the one that the wonderful David Rumsey acquired and uploaded to his map collection site. Until I read the fine print, I hadn’t realised that the maps in fact dated to 1611/12 and therefore were older than the Blaeu atlas.

This is the period immediately following the Battle of Kinsale in 1603, which marked the decisive end to the Nine Year’s War, and to the old Gaelic way of life. The maps were also made in the period after the failed Desmond Rebellions of 1569–1573 and 1579–1583. They still name the great Irish families rather than the English planters who would so totally supplant them over the course of the next century. In this regard, it is an important record of what was happening on the ground in 1611.

Along with his Atlas he produced a work that combined history and geography – the Invasions of England and Ireland, in 1601 and 1627. He was, of course, a devoted subject of the Queen (‘her sacred maiestie’) and his political opinions tended to the conservative, if not puritantinical.

This map is accompanied by the history of invasions, with suitable illustrations. I am particularly taken with the depiction of ‘Desmond beheded’

True to his day, he depicted the Irish quite differently from the British – the lowest grade of English person was the Countryman or Country woman, whereas in Ireland it was the Wilde Man or Woman.

The city maps were all new and it seems that Speed, with one of his sons, actually travelled to the cities he includes in his atlas and paced out the distances, drawing the maps based on these calculations. They are a unique and invaluable record of a time when Ireland had walled cities, especially given that so few intact stretches of those walls remain. (We’ve visited some impressive remains, though – see Youghal’s Walls and our post on the walled town of Fethard.)

The Dublin map is from a later edition

The actual physical depiction of the land is recognisably based on the Mercator map but there is more information now about locations and families. I was delighted to see Rossbrin show up (Roßbrenon) along with Ardintenant (Artenay), since it is this castle that we look across to from our home. Mizen Head and Brow Head are both marked, and the Sheep’s Head is also noted as Moentervary (Muintir Bheara is the Irish designation for that Peninsula).

Besides the O’Mahonys, the O’Driscolls, the McCarthys, the O’Donovans, Sir Peter Carew occupies a chunk of land. Someday I will write about his claim to that land and the lengths he went to to secure the deeds to it. But perhaps I shouldn’t be too exclusive to West Cork: below is a section of North Cork and part of Kerry in 1612. What can you see?

Maps drawn by a colonising power, have an agenda far beyond simply charting the territory. John Speed’s became the defining maps of the expanding British Empire during the seventeenth century and indeed they influenced British people’s perceptions of the world until well into the eighteenth. For us in Ireland, and in West Cork, they are an invaluable social document.

Mapping West Cork, Part 1

Here Be Pirates!

Crough Bay in the townland of Leamcon – one of the sheltered and hidden moorings which became known as a pirates’ nest in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This is a view of part of the former estate of Sir William Hull who, as Vice Admiral of Munster, was charged with routing the pirates but in fact connived with them for his own financial gain

…Ireland may well be called the nursery and storehouse of pirates… wrote Sir Henry Mainwaring in a manuscript now in the British Museum (A Discourse of Pirates, on the suppression of piracy 1618). He had first-hand knowledge: this adventurer who was born in the time of Elizabeth spent most of his life at sea, survived the English Civil War – although on the losing side – and had been privateer, pirate and Royal Naval captain. He died at the age of 66 with his feet on dry land, although in poverty and exile in France.

map of baltimore

The Earl of Cork’s map of Baltimore,1628 –  following well-founded fears of ‘Turk’ raids he petitioned the Admiralty to fortify the coastal settlements. He was ignored and in 1631 the town was sacked and burned by Barbary pirates who carried away over 100 of the residents to the slave markets in Morroco

My possible ancestor Captain James Harris of Bristol died with his feet in the air: he was hanged at Wapping, in the estuary of the Thames, with 16 other pirates in December 1609. They had been captured in Baltimore, in sight of Roaringwater Bay. Why was it that Ireland – and, in particular, this coastline of west Cork was the notorious harbourer of pirates from all over Europe?

behold leamcon

According to Mainwaring, the west of Ireland was enticing because food and men were abundant; fewer naval ships patrolled the coast [than in England]; many of the local inhabitants were willing to trade with the pirates; and there was a …good store of English, Scottish, and Irish wenches which resort unto them… 

1611 John Speed map – Roaringwater

John Speed’s map of 1611 which portrays ‘Ballatimore Bay’ and Carbery’s Hundred Islands – ideal territory for concealing pirates. Note the curious geography, the names of the Irish clans and some of the places we recognise today: Rossbrenon (Rosbrin); Lemcon; Shepes Head and Myssen Head

The coast of west Cork, in particular, was eminently suitable for sheltering ships in need of careening and victualling: bays, coves, inlets and estuaries abound and Carbery’s Hundred Isles (in fact many more than a hundred but it depends on what you count as an island) offer refuges a-plenty. In Captain Harris’s time there was only one naval ship patrolling the whole area from Kinsale around to Bantry and beyond – and this was the Tremontane – an ancient leaky pinnace which could be easily outrun by any respectable pirate crew. All the more unfortunate, then, for my forebear and his band who fell into the hands of the authorities, no doubt through some act of treachery or double-dealing.

Captain Harris’s family paid to retrieve his body from the gallows at Execution Dock (above left) and gave him a Christian burial. It was more usual for the bodies to be immersed by ‘three high tides’ before being disposed of. In particularly notorious cases the corpses were tarred and then hung in gibbets (iron cages – above right) to remain in public view. Captain Kidd was displayed this way for at least forty years after his death in 1701.

pirate ship

…The Irish folk surreptitiously colluded with pirates. When a captain needed supplies, he sent word of his needs. The reply to his note told him where he might find “so many Beeves or other refreshments as he shall need” on a specific night. When he and his men came ashore, they were to fire upon those who tended the herd, which allowed the herders to claim that they had been forced to hand over the cattle. Later on, he secretly landed “the goods or money in exchange, which by custom, they expect must be 2 or 3 times the value” If the pirates desired arms and/or ammunition and the Irish had any, they traded those items, too… (from Pirates and Privateers – The History of Maritime Piracy – an excellent online resource compiled by Cindy Vallar).

If you would like to learn more about Pirates in west Cork (and to listen to some great music) come along to the Fastnet Maritime + Folk Festival in Ballydehob this weekend 17th – 19th June: Robert is giving an illustrated talk on William Hull and the Leamcon Pirates’ Nest on Saturday 18th at 2.30pm in the Old Bank Building