Annaleigh Margey will give the 2020 D.A. Chart Seminar on Maps with the topic of Ulster’s cartography and settlement during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a distinct watershed in the history of settlement in Ireland. The advent of formal English, and later, British, plantation policies brought a wave of new settlers, and later, settlements, across Ireland. Historians and historical geographers have long debated the impacts of these settlements, with studies focusing on the political, social, cultural, ethnographic, landscape, changes, emerging through the intervening centuries. Amongst the most significant changes were those to the landscape of Ireland, with new boundaries, rural and urban settlements, architecture; all distinguishing the plantation phase of Irish history.

This seminar will seek to grapple with a set of source materials for these changes: namely the surveys and maps produced by Englishmen in Ireland during the decades of plantation. It will focus specifically on Ulster, examining how, in a post-plantation analysis, these surveys and maps, can be used to inform our understanding of the multiplicity of impacts and changes, from political to landscape, that occurred in the province. Utilising the surviving maps, of which there are over 600 for the whole of Ireland, it will take a chronological approach to the analysis, showing the representation of changing landscapes from basic reconnaissance through to settlement. In doing so, it will interrogate the contexts of these maps to explore their hidden meanings and agendas and to elucidate the changing policies applied to the province over the decades of plantation.

Annaleigh Margey is the Acting Head of Department and a Lecturer in History in the Department of Humanities at Dundalk Institute of Technology. Originally from Letterkenny, she studied for her BA and PhD at NUI, Galway. Her PhD research titled ‘Mapping during the Irish Plantations, 1550-1636’, focused on the surveys and maps created by surveyors in Ireland during the decades of plantation. She subsequently held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship and a J.B. Harley Fellowship in the History of Cartography to continue this research at Trinity College Dublin. More recently, Annaleigh has worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen on ‘The 1641 Depositions Project’ and at the Institute of Historical Research, London where she conducted research on the property and charity of the Clothworkers’ Company in early modern London. She has also worked as a researcher on a project at NUI, Maynooth and the National Library of Ireland focusing on the rentals and maps in the landed estates of Ireland collections in the library’s holdings. Most recently, she has edited a book with her colleagues Elaine Murphy and Eamon Darcy on The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion, and will shortly publish another book Mapping Ireland, c.1550-1636: a catalogue of the early modern maps of Ireland with the Irish Manuscripts Commission. She is currently working on a cross-border project with Armagh Robinson Library and Marsh’s Library, Dublin to digitise, and exhibit, the map holdings of the two eighteenth-century libraries. She has written several articles on early modern mapping in Ireland, particularly on Ulster, and on the 1641 depositions.

This event is taking place on Zoom. Registration closes one hour before the event and an invite link will be sent to everyone registered one hour before the beginning of the event.