Mapping Ulster

Finding our way around has never seemed easier.

Today's mapping technology allows us to locate where we need to go

quickly and accurately.

This urge to map is a basic, enduring human instinct.

Where would we be without maps?

One obvious answer is, of course, lost.

But maps provide answers to many more questions

than simply how to get from one place to another.

I have studied and written about maps my entire working life.

I'm fascinated by what drives the creation of a map...

..and what it can tell us about the age in which it was made.

And in this programme,

I'm on the trail of an extraordinary hoard of maps...

..maps of a land of huge political significance,

painting a picture of war, migration and economic transformation...

Any of these maps is really showing the Irish landscape

for the first time.

It's this idea of "Look what we have uncovered, look what we have found.

"This is the end of Gaelic Ulster and the beginning of something new."

The men in London looking at the maps,

they were living in a virtual world

and didn't really understand, I think, what was going on.

It's about security, it's about religion,

but it's also about profit,

and Ireland was a place where men could become rich.

..a land at Europe's very edge...

Ulster.

Maps have always been so much more than getting us from A to B.

Throughout history, the rich and the powerful have used maps

to lay claim to distant places and possessions.

In the 16th century, the mapmaker Abraham Ortelius called maps

"the eye of history",

because he believed

that people could see and remember historical events much more vividly

using maps, than in written descriptions.

And 400 years ago was an absolutely defining moment

in the history of maps,

because this was a period of exploration and discovery,

the Spanish, the Portuguese and the English laying claim

to territories in the New World of the Americas and in Asia.

And central to that process were maps.

Maps were a piece of technological kit which were as important

in the 16th century as they are today, in our current online world.

One of the most intensively-mapped regions in the 1600s, however,

lay much closer to home than the Americas.

It was the north part of Ireland - Ulster.

An amazing treasure trove of maps survives from this period.

Collectively, they present a vivid portrait

of the dramatic early years

of Scottish and English settlement in Ulster.

Each map tells its own story, of war and conquest,

of a great influx of entrepreneurs and adventurers

and of a wild landscape transformed into a network of towns.

England had first laid claim to Ireland

in the Anglo-Norman conquest of the 12th century.

From that moment on, control of the land was a tug-of-war

between the Crown and the Gaelic lords.

Ireland is divided into four provinces...

..Munster, Leinster, Connacht and Ulster.

Historically, the Gaelic lords controlled all four provinces

and the territories within them.

But in 1558, when Queen Elizabeth came to the throne,

the English were in control of most of the eastern coast,

which was called the Pale.

And the Queen's desire to strengthen English rule in Ireland

grew more urgent during her long war with Spain.

She feared Ireland would become a launch pad

for an invasion of England.

But up until the late 16th century, there was one province

that was still out of control of the English crown, and that was Ulster.

To gain control of an area requires intimate knowledge of the terrain.

But up until the late 1500s, Ulster remained largely a mystery,

or certainly to the English.

Hidden by rolling fields and vast tracts of forest,

this was a province that retained its secrets,

undiscovered and largely unmapped.

An unhappy 16th-century mapmaker offers one reason why -

"short days, dark and foul weather

"and the boggy mountains, as well, full of mire and water".

What did exist was drawn on a small scale,

only hinting at what lay within the interior.

But the mysteries of the landscape

would soon be revealed in exceptional detail by

a new wave of mapmakers, under the orders of the Queen and her army.

Annaleigh, this is an extraordinary landscape.

You can see that, down there, the space is incredibly flat,

but we come up here and we have this great vantage point

and the terrain suddenly gets very mountainous.

Tell me about it. What, for you, is significant about this?

Well, this is a really significant part,

because we're basically on a hill, in the middle of County Louth.

I mean, you look down straight ahead of you,

you see the flat land, which is leading towards the Pale,

and over to the right we've got the real hills of Ulster.

And this would have been one of the direct routes the English armies

would have marched through and many of the cartographers with them.

If you're an English cartographer faced with that landscape,

presumably you're going to be a bit nervous.

I mean, what problems are they facing?

Well, obviously, you're probably going to be

very challenged by that kind of terrain,

because of just the sheer nature and the scale of the mountains.

Quite a large amount of this would have had much more tree cover,

so it would have been pretty daunting when you would come along.

What about the Irish at this time? Are they mapping, as well?

We've not come across any surviving in any archive in Ireland or Britain.

And I mean, that takes us to the wider idea of what mapping really is.

I mean, is it that idea of, you know,

we had an oral culture in Ireland at that point in time?

It would also have opened it up potentially

to that landscape being discovered by others,

so two neighbouring Gaelic chieftains

may not have wanted the other to know too much about their lands.

Mapping it down would have given physical evidence to that.

So any of these maps

is really showing the Irish landscape for the first time.

Mapping this uncharted territory

presented both a challenge and a risk for the mapmaker.

In 1598, Queen Elizabeth I commissioned Francis Jobson

to make a survey of Ulster.

He produced a map which, at first glance

presents a colourful, attractive picture of the area.

But the artistry belies the real intention behind its creation...

reconnaissance.

And for the mapmaker, the mission was so dangerous

that he wrote he was "every hour in danger to lose my head".

The purpose of Jobson's expedition was to uncover the complex network

of Gaelic families who governed Ulster.

The map identifies who they are and where they live,

amongst them the McSweeneys the O'Boyles and the O'Cahans.

The most powerful was a man of especial interest

to Queen Elizabeth I and her military advisors,

Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone.

The map recognises his power, marking the place

where he was inaugurated as chief of the O'Neills.

This is a very strange space.

I walked in and my pulse rate started to go.

There's something incredibly powerful about it

and very mysterious,

that very powerful things have happened here.

And Hugh O'Neill, who was the most powerful of all the Gaelic lords,

was enshrined as chief of the O'Neills here at Tullaghoge,

looking out over the whole landscape.

And he was enthroned in an enormous stone chair

in the centre, over there.

And you can really feel the power of that moment of him taking control.

It's almost like he's a god surveying everything that he sees.

And you really do get that feeling of godlike control.

It's quite wonderful,

but it's also a little bit spooky. It's extraordinary.

Queen Elizabeth I, however,

had ambitions to smash that control and take it for the Crown.

And the evidence is in Jobson's map.

A series of brightly-coloured boundaries

offers a new vision of the region,

dividing it into counties, according to the English custom.

The Queen's desire to control Ulster

met with violent resistance from O'Neill

and resulted in England's costliest campaign yet in Ireland,

the Nine Years' War.

The Queen underestimated O'Neill

and his highly-trained army of Irish and Scottish soldiers.

At the battle of the Yellow Ford, outside Armagh,

the English faced their greatest-ever defeat in Ireland,

losing 2,000 men.

The Queen even sent her favourite, the Earl of Essex,

with over 17,000 troops.

Again, after fierce fighting and an unofficial truce,

this ended in failure.

Inflamed, the Queen swore she'd humble the arch-traitor O'Neill

with her sword,

but instead sent Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy,

to do the job for her.

Mountjoy arrived in Ireland in 1600.

With him was a man who would reveal

some of the landscape's best-kept secrets to the outside world.

Mountjoy brought with him a mapmaker called Richard Bartlett,

who would provide a vivid eyewitness account of the campaign.

The account took the form of a series of beautifully-rendered maps,

intended for presentation at Elizabeth's royal court.

The maps have now been returned to Ireland

and are considered a national treasure.

What is truly extraordinary about Bartlett's work, however,

is that it opens a window into the past

more revealing than any written version.

It's always an enormous thrill

when you see manuscripts like this for the first time,

and these Bartlett maps are absolutely beautiful.

What first strikes you is that they ARE the work of an artist.

This is an assured draughtsman.

The line is very fine,

the colours are very striking, but also very muted.

But as always with maps, there's more than one dimension to them.

As you start to look more closely, a different aspect starts to emerge,

and what you have here is actually a military landscape.

What you can see is that these are spaces

which are about military fortifications.

There are castles, there are forts,

there are lines through which troops can move.

This is a story that's being told through maps.

This is about war and it's about conquest.

What is also remarkable about Bartlett's maps

is that they are military intelligence,

providing a chronological account of Mountjoy's campaign.

And the first step in that campaign

was gaining control of the gateway to Ulster.

The Moyry Pass is a narrow valley and was once the only way north

through the thickly forested and mountainous region.

Whoever controlled the pass

controlled the main entry point into Ulster.

This ruined and dramatically situated castle in South Armagh

represents THE turning point in the Nine Years' War.

Some of the most brutal fighting of the war took place here.

The prize was control of the pass.

Jim, you share a surname with Hugh O'Neill.

Tell me what happened here between him and Mountjoy.

You see, O'Neill knew this was crucial ground,

and throughout the war this was always very important.

Mountjoy knew he had to come through here,

but O'Neill had fortified this pass.

Why is this area so important?

You've got to remember that south of Ulster,

it's like this barrier of drumlins and forests

that really is actually quite impenetrable

with the type of army that Mountjoy had.

So he had two options.

He had to go up through the west coast, up by Ballyshannon,

or go up through the Moyry,

and O'Neill knew this, and this is where he waited for him.

Mountjoy arrived in September 1600 with over 3,000 men.

O'Neill met him with an equal number and a crucial advantage...

detailed knowledge of the largely unmapped, difficult terrain.

So you actually had fortifications up on this ridge here?

He had fortifications on this ridge and that ridge,

so that not only had he created barricades here,

he'd created a kill zone,

so that whenever Mountjoy's army entered it,

he could not only fight them from the front,

he could actually pour on fire on both flanks.

After three weeks of fighting, Mountjoy withdrew.

Inexplicably, O'Neill also departed, leaving the pass undefended.

Mountjoy saw his opportunity and seized it.

Jim, this is Bartlett's map of this area. The castle wasn't there, then.

Absolutely not. The castle didn't get built till June of 1601,

after Mountjoy had taken the pass.

He didn't want to have a repeat of September, October 1600,

so he built this castle to make sure

that this pass would stay firmly in the hands of the Crown.

What you're seeing is the unfolding of the campaign.

I mean, the map is really rather beautiful,

but there's something a bit more sinister going on here, isn't there?

It's a beautiful piece of art,

but this wasn't a cartographer who happened to be with military men.

This seemed to be a military man that was also working as a cartographer.

With earlier maps, the pass had been seen as one great block of trees.

At least now they had details, they could see causeways,

they could see where they had to turn and where they could and couldn't go.

And certainly, if we think about war reporting,

this is somebody who is embedded

and he has an investment in producing

this kind of image of the campaign, doesn't he?

Absolutely. And he's lucky he's in it at this point,

because at this point, the campaign is starting to go right.

OK, we had the bloody excesses of the Moyry Pass earlier in the year,

but by this stage, you've got a firm footing in Gaelic Ulster.

What Mountjoy did next struck at the very heart of O'Neill's power.

And recording this dramatic, pivotal moment in Ireland's history

was the mapmaker, Richard Bartlett.

This is probably one of Bartlett's most interesting maps,

because it has three real stages.

You can see the Irish under attack at the very top.

You can see the very ordered English troops marching along,

even down to their horses and their pikes.

And when you move to the middle section, you see Dungannon,

obviously the heart of the O'Neill estate in Ulster.

And there it is with the flag of St George.

It really shows you that that is the conquest of Ireland.

And at the bottom, we have Tullaghoge,

which was the traditional seat for the crowning of the O'Neill family.

It's very much in a rural location,

it would have been very hard to find,

and here you have it so prominently displayed on a map.

It's this idea of "Look what we have uncovered, look what we have found."

And it's that idea, almost of, you know,

"This is the end of Gaelic Ulster and the beginning of something new".

The chair was destroyed on Mountjoy's orders in 1602,

and just a few months later, as Queen Elizabeth lay dying,

O'Neill surrendered.

Four years later, along with the other chieftains of Ulster,

he fled Ireland for good

in what became known as the Flight of the Earls.

The Crown confiscated all their lands.

The way was now open for England to lay claim to all of Ireland

because of this conquest of the north.

Bartlett's maps provide a graphic account

of the Elizabethan military campaign in Ulster.

He was the 17th-century equivalent of a war reporter,

sending back dispatches from the front line to the English court.

And if history is written by the winners,

then Richard Bartlett's maps of Ulster during the Nine Years' War

show that geography is likewise drawn by the victors.

And his skill is such

that he captures the devastation of a landscape changed for ever by war.

Bartlett's apparent delight at being on the victor's side

was short-lived.

He was commissioned to make a true and perfect map

of the northernmost parts of Ulster, Donegal.

His fate was recorded by letters

written by the Attorney General of Ireland.

He said, "Our geographers do not forget the entertainment

"the Irish of Tir Chonaill gave to a mapmaker

"after the late rebellion.

"The inhabitants took off his head

"because they would not have their country discovered."

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, with no direct heirs.

The successor was King James VI of Scotland,

and he was crowned here in London as James I of England and Ireland.

All three kingdoms were now united under one crown.

James was a Protestant.

He also believed in the divine right of kings

to rule with absolute authority

over England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

He'd already tried to settle plantations in rural Scotland,

as a way of raising revenue for his cash-strapped kingdom,

and his reign would also be responsible for establishing

the first English colony in the Americas, Jamestown in Virginia.

The King actively encouraged adventurers and entrepreneurs

to set out for the New World and settle there in his name.

But he was equally passionate that his subjects would do likewise

in a land much closer to home - the newly-conquered Ulster.

King James's Scottish origins would play an enormous part

in who settled there and geography aided him, too.

There's only 18 miles between the Scottish and Irish coasts here.

And this lush and fertile spar of land, known as the Ards Peninsula,

had had a long history of trade

and intermarriage with families on the Scottish coast.

Even before the conquest of Ulster,

prospective settlers had spotted its potential.

There had been a previous attempt to settle the peninsula by the English.

In 1571, Queen Elizabeth offered her secretary of state,

Sir Thomas Smith,

the opportunity to develop a colony along the peninsula.

Thomas Smith hit on the bright idea of producing a promotional booklet

to try and attract investors, and he gave it a really hard sell

by asking people "to possess a land that floweth with milke and hony",

although, surprisingly,

Sir Thomas Smith also didn't underplay the weather conditions,

advising that "Ireland requireth lasting and warm clothes".

The booklet included a very basic yet attractive map of the peninsula.

But this is also a map driven by personal and financial ambitions.

As a window into Ulster's past, it gives only a partial view.

What it deliberately doesn't show is any sign of the Gaelic lord

who also claimed ownership of the land at that time.

Only 100 colonists arrived

and, by 1573, the colony had failed, due to the fierce local opposition,

ending in the murder of Sir Thomas's son.

30 years later, it was a different story.

The conquest of Ulster had smoothed the way

for Ulster's closest neighbours, the Scottish,

to settle on the peninsula.

The grand migration scheme that followed

was down to the determination, luck and cunning of two Scottish men.

James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery were favourites of King James I.

Hugh Montgomery was from one of the most powerful families in Scotland,

while James Hamilton, an academic,

was the son of a minister from Ayrshire.

Both men saw the Ards Peninsula as an accessible new frontier

where they could make their fortunes.

And it was at their invitation that a cross section of Scottish society

landed in this very harbour to begin a new way of life.

But what compelled hundreds of ordinary men and women

to leave their native Scotland in the first place?

It's beautiful, but tell me how this works as an economic landscape,

and how would it have operated in the 16th century?

Really, to understand the 16th century, early 17th century situation

you need to go back to the 14th century,

when you had the Black Death and a severe decline in population.

Because of that, pastoral farming was allowed to dominate.

Cattle, really, were able to take over a lot of land

because there was no humans there.

There was a sharp increase then in the population

and to provide food for that burgeoning population

they had to start bringing more land under cultivation.

Is that part of the reason for the settlement, the move towards Ulster?

Because I look at this landscape and I think, "Why would you leave this?"

Yeah. I mean, Ireland would have suffered the same amount of rainfall,

but the land quality was more fertile for growing crops.

You still had a dominance of pastoral farming in certain areas,

but there was more land available there

for them to grow crops, to supplement what they needed here.

The prospect of land

and a new life only a short sail from Scotland proved very appealing.

The first settlers left Ayrshire in the summer of 1606.

But as word spread, a stream of people

departed Argyll, Dumfries & Galloway and Perthshire,

all bound for Ulster.

So, what kind of people were leaving this area to go to Ireland?

They were the younger sons of noble families who went looking for land.

They took with them their tenant farmers,

because they weren't going to work the land. They were the landowners.

You had to take masons, carpenters, ironworkers,

the whole cross section that you really needed

to support a brand-new community.

And for Hamilton, a man from humble beginnings, it offered

the chance to build his very own sprawling and lucrative estate.

So Ireland, for him, was really an opportunity, and he grasped it fully.

He set about establishing towns, he built himself a mansion,

he was licensed to hold fairs and markets,

and he worked himself literally

into quite a high-status position in Ireland.

That gives him an opportunity,

and if they invest in that, they do very well out of it.

Both Montgomery and Hamilton would acquire great wealth and titles.

But it came at a cost.

A bitter feud erupted between the two men over who owned what.

Hamilton's response was to use the latest advances in mapmaking

to record the land he owned and who lived on it.

And at the same time, he also left history with a wonderful depiction

of the lives of the early Scottish settlers in Ulster.

The Book of Maps was drawn by an English surveyor

called Thomas Raven.

Raven was one of the most prolific mapmakers in Ulster at this period,

and he was also unique, because he produced in a very long career

a whole slew of different kinds of maps.

They included large surveys, plantation maps, town maps

and maps like this of an estate.

And this is his Book of Maps of the Hamilton estates.

Wow! It is really, really a very beautiful frontispiece,

where he shows you this is a book which is commissioned by Hamilton,

and from there what do we get?

A wonderful map of Bangor,

and you can actually begin to see the town itself as it's developing.

The settlement here shows you in real detail the bay of Bangor,

and then you can see the main street of Bangor running up here.

You can see the cony burrow. This is wonderful.

So, this is Hamilton showing burrows of rabbits,

and the rabbits rather beautifully drawn there, in relief.

So it's really interesting that the map is both

around settlement, in terms of mapping the space,

but also showing economic dimensions.

So, people wanted to eat rabbits, and they also were growing wheat,

so you've got the wheat hill.

You've got a sense

of where everybody's apportion of the land is.

And what's really revealing about Raven's series of maps

is what else it can tell us about the settlers.

The names inscribed on the parcels of land - Dunlap, Nesbitt, Austin -

confirm that the first settlers were all of Scottish origin.

Church Hill and Church Yard are also clearly marked.

The settlers were mostly Protestant.

The map shows the centrality of faith to their lives.

And the sheer numbers of people on this land paying rent to Hamilton

tells us that estate is prospering

and his dream of making a fortune in Ulster is beginning to be realised.

One of Raven's most beautifully drawn maps features

a village on the shores of Strangford Lough.

Overlooking it is a fairytale-like castle.

This was Hamilton's new home, Killyleagh.

The castle and the village remain to this day.

The castle has changed a good deal in the last 400 years,

but you can still see traces of the original as depicted on the map.

Hamilton's descendant and his family continue to live here,

in the oldest inhabited castle in Ireland.

Good to meet you. How are you?

Gawn, there's three of us here in the room,

because we've got your ancestor, James Hamilton, up there.

And I've got a quote suggesting that he was very learned, laborious

and noble, especially to strangers and scholars.

Do you think that's quite a good assessment of him?

He was clearly wise and learned, his libraries were extensive.

He was a teacher and certainly set up a school in Dublin.

Bold?

Most definitely. I like to think of him as more of a pirate, really.

I think that he would have been a hard man to cross.

I don't think I'd like to be him.

I think he was more of a, sort of, Robert Maxwell character.

You know, he started off life as the son of the Vicar of Dunlop

and he ended up being one of the largest landowners in Ireland

and...I think he did it by some sharp means, too.

But, nevertheless, I do have some admiration for him.

He was a highly successful man,

from whichever angle you like to look at it from.

We've been looking at Raven's Book Of Maps.

Can you tell us why they were commissioned?

What was the impetus behind that?

The maps were requested by Hamilton, in order to settle,

or help settle, the arguments he was having with Montgomery.

I mean, they had, basically, a standing army for about 20-30 years

and skirmishes would happen regularly between the families.

In fact, Montgomery on his deathbed said in the intel and the will

that no Montgomery could inherit if they'd ever marry a Hamilton

and over 400-plus years, the families have never intermarried,

which is extraordinary, really, given that they were neighbours.

So, Gawn, we've got Raven's map here,

which, rather wonderfully, has the castle down in the corner.

But just try and orientate me here.

What do you see as you look at that?

Well, the first thing I see is the harbour, which, of course,

was the commercial rationale for the village

and you can see the harbour there, the little bay there.

The other thing I am amused by is the church hill,

which you see now as the church standing there.

That steeple is a much later addition.

But otherwise, you have the grid layout of Killyleagh

and you have traditionally what's called Front Street

and Back Street, which is now called Plantation Street.

But you can see the workmen's cottages there

and how they were lined out and these were the....

predominantly, the stone buildings

that Hamilton would have built, after he came here.

Raven's map shows a thriving community

with plots around the castle,

also portioned out to settlers with Scottish names

such as John Stuarde, Robert Hogg and Andrew Harde.

And next to them is the feature which would come to characterise

the changing landscape of 17th-century Ulster -

a small commercial town.

And are these names - in terms of the people who have these parcels of land -

are they still relevant to you?

Do they resonate? Hogg, Boyle, Hamilton...

Hogg certainly does, yes.

-They are names that you will still find in the village.

-Yeah.

Down there, stretches of the Ards Peninsula

and almost all the land around here in the early 17th century was Hamilton-Montgomery land.

And the Scots that they invited to settle this area built villages, they built towns.

They settled farms, they created mills.

And they developed a heavily agricultural area -

look at the parcels of land around here.

They have left their mark on the landscape.

Raven's maps very clearly record the successful early years

of the Scottish migration to the Ards Peninsula.

The news of the flourishing and profitable settlement

was eagerly received by King James I.

Following the Flight of the Earls in 1607, he had huge swathes

of confiscated land at his disposal in Central and Western Ulster.

Keen to copy Hamilton and Montgomery's success on a grander scale

and to fill the land with his own loyal subjects,

the King launched the most expansive

and ambitious plan for colonisation ever seen in Western Europe.

The scheme became known as the Plantation of Ulster.

Gaining a more accurate impression of the land was vital...

In other words, the King needed more maps.

In 1609, he commissioned Sir Josias Bodley

to survey Central and Western Ulster,

showing the goodness, or badness, of the soil with the woods,

mountains, rivers, bogs and lochs.

It's always a great moment

seeing these maps in the flesh for the first time

and these are Bodley's survey maps.

Beautiful, beautiful maps.

This is doing something very different from the military maps

or the estate maps that we have been looking at.

This is very much about preparation for settlement.

You can tell the way in which the landscape

is being drawn here by Bodley.

And then, you also have mountainous regions, which are perhaps

not so ripe for settlement.

And the townlands have been drawn very carefully,

very deliberately, and here is another part of Loughinsholin.

And again, the labelling of the townlands - very precise,

very careful.

This is about where people can come, they can live their lives,

develop their trades.

This is about a prelude to settlement and plantation.

Not all of the maps drawn by Bodley and his team have survived.

These two show the ancient barony of Loughinsholin,

located today in Central Ulster.

Really, at this point in time,

you've got the Crown in London wanting to rival those

European powers which were starting to get real empires

and also looking for money, trade and colonisation, really.

So this is really the westward expansion of the Jacobean period,

it is just starting at this point?

Yes, exactly. So it is also about knowledge, as well, being power.

You've had an earlier period where everything was

written down about land, but obviously,

if you are in London, you are a long way away from the land in question.

How can you visualise it?

And in fact, these are just two of very many Irish maps

that we have in the National Archives

from the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

And if you look at the earlier maps, you can see that the view

they portrayed to London is showing sea monsters and wolves

and wild men, so the London view is,

"Gosh, that must be a really dangerous country..."

But these are now very different, aren't they? This is a whole different world.

This is actually showing us land which is neat, organised...

It is suggesting a, sort of, familiarity - a land

which can be made into plantations very much like estates at home.

These are to be seen by ministers of state, who are going to be

informed by the maps and it will influence their decisions.

So they are, kind of, state papers, really, aren't they?

That's right, they are working papers,

they are not a finished reference map.

They are really a working map, to show the information that they

needed in London to make their policy.

Maps always reveal the concerns and interests of their makers.

In the case of Bodley, the maps highlight a feature which

once characterised the landscape of Western and Central Ulster...

..the huge tracts of forest,

which stretch from the Sperrin Mountains to Loch Neagh.

I can really see now why the Gaelic chiefs regarded these woods

as such strongholds.

It is also no surprise that the English called them

the most dangerous places in Ireland.

Finding and removing these hiding places was strategic,

but more importantly,

Bodley's survey identified the forests as a source of great profit.

This discovery would dramatically change the landscape of Ulster.

In the early 1600s, timber was worth its weight in gold.

It was needed for ships, barrels, fuel and housing.

England had almost stripped her own countryside bare

and so, over time, the once vast forests of Ulster were reduced

to the few scattered clusters of woodland that remain today.

Well, once this would have been all oak woodland,

that's where Derry gets its name - from the word "oak", "Doire".

And, in fact, what we have here is an oak woodland which was

part of the great forests of Glenconkeyne and Killetra.

So, in fact, it's a massive great big oak woodland.

In the 1600s, a lot of that would have been harvested,

a lot of it would have been shipped up the river, bound to Coleraine

and exported across for housebuilding and things like that.

Tell me about the maps, because Bodley's maps are very beautiful,

but are they still relevant for you today?

Those are the very basis for us

defining what ancient woodland is in Northern Ireland.

When we started speaking about ancient woodland in the mid-1990s,

people were very cynical and sceptical

that there was such a thing as ancient woodland in Northern Ireland.

As they were cynical,

they were looking for reasons to kind of disprove what we were saying,

but the fact that we could go back to Bodley, Raven and Bartlett,

and look at the old maps

that had been done in preparation for the Plantation of Ulster,

made our project so robust.

And as you walk through it and you think about the 400-year history of the woodland,

how do you react to it and respond to it?

It is amazing, because I think there is a very, very special feel.

And I think you begin to think back about all of the people

and all of the occurrences in the province over the last 400 years

that these actual trees around us have witnessed.

And if we take an oak tree at 400 years old, it is but a baby.

You know, it's possibly got another 800 years that it can live,

so it will be around to see some more generations coming through

this woodland and I think that is what makes it very, very special.

So there is a power to the map to affect change,

even 400 years after it is first created.

Bodley's maps have had a dual impact upon the Ulster woodland.

Originally, they were drawn to define the woods

as an economic resource and led to their destruction.

But today, those same maps are being used to preserve that woodland.

In the early 1600s, within a very short space of time,

the once mysterious and impenetrable Ulster had been surveyed

and mapped in great detail.

King James I now had the necessary knowledge

to divide the land into estates and award them to Scottish

and English noblemen and soldiers who had served in Ireland.

By 1613, almost 9,000 English

and Scottish tenants had settled on the new estates.

This was just the beginning.

Throughout the rest of the 17th century, tens of thousands

more settlers - mostly Scottish - would pour into Ulster.

James I's ambitions for plantation across the whole of Ulster

were beginning to be realised.

Plantations cost money

and this one could have been a huge drain on the Royal purse,

especially because James wanted to introduce specifically

English ways of doing business and commerce in Ireland.

So he devised a plan to settle the northernmost territories of Ulster.

He called on the resources and commercial expertise

of one of the wealthiest institutions in the entire land,

the Guilds of London.

The Guilds dated back to mediaeval times.

Named after the trades they represented -

amongst them the Salters, Vintners, Skinners and Ironmongers -

they were already involved in the new colony in Virginia.

They were more reluctant to accept the offer of land in this remote

and hostile part of Ulster, stating that,

"It would be very foolish to intermeddle in this business."

Ian, tell me about the London Companies, what are they exactly?

Well, first of all, they are the associations through which

London craftsmen and tradesmen organised their economic life

and secondly, they have an important political role,

because it is through the companies that London

has exercised their political rights,

which means that the companies are really quite wealthy

organisations, or look to be so from the point of view of the Crown,

and that makes them

a rather attractive target for Royal projects like the Ulster Plantation.

Why does the Crown want to get them involved?

It is partly ideological and it is partly economic.

Ideological, because the Ulster Project from the Crown's point of view

was very much a civilising one

and towns were central to notions of civility.

Urbanism was going to civilise the Irish.

And secondly, I think the Crown feels that London is going to bring

its commercial expertise to the development of the economy.

The London Companies were asked to invest £60,000,

or in today's money, between £2-£3 billion.

I think you can imagine the sort of sense of shock.

When Londoners were first given this offer they were not very keen on it.

Initially, the City sought voluntary subscriptions and it was quite clear

that that was not going to work and people just absented themselves.

Then the City turns to compulsory levies

on the Livery Company members.

Many of them are imprisoned before they pay,

others in the Grocers' Company, for example,

are threatened with the loss of their freedom, which is

a really serious sanction, because that would mean

closing their shops and denying them of voting powers.

It is a sign that the stakes are really high,

so they have to be squeezed really hard to pay up.

This is not a project that they are engaging in with any enthusiasm.

To sweeten the deal, a new county was created,

which included the timber-rich forests of Glenconkeyne

and the teeming fisheries of the rivers Foyle and Bann.

Renamed Londonderry, the companies were required to clear the

Gaelic Irish off the land and bring in English and Scottish settlers.

And an account of what happened in the early years of the plantation

is recorded in a stunning book of maps.

These maps are made by the same person who was mapping

the Hamilton estates, but they are very different.

These are Thomas Raven's maps of Londonderry,

and this is almost a zooming out and seeing the way in which land

is being apportioned, and what you are seeing is the Vintners'...

Then you also have Drapers' Land, you have the Salters' Lands,

you have the Mercers' Lands...

There's not really much sense of a landscape here...

It is very beautiful, the artistry is there,

but this is very much about political geography.

It is about dividing the land up.

And if we then go further in, there is a sort of drilling down

that is going on.

It is almost like a digital surveillance map that we have today,

to go from one point up in space

and then you zoom right down to the Vintners' buildings at Bellaghy...

And look at the detail here that you've got.

The way in which a settlement is starting to emerge.

The very earliest settlers were mostly English.

They built timber-framed houses in a style which was

common in the south of England.

The names of the people on the Vintners' portion -

which include William Dearde, Ellis Oakes and William Cox -

are distinctively English, too.

The London Companies built villages like the one at Bellaghy

in each of their 12 portions.

The most important town of the plantation, however,

was the greatest urban structure Ireland had seen to date.

The London companies were required to fortify, to settle and to build.

And 400 years ago, they built these walls

around the existing town of Derry,

making it the final walled city in Europe.

Their name for the new city

was the same as their new county - Londonderry.

It would be the commercial hub of the plantation.

Its purpose, to trade with England, Scotland, the rest of Europe

and the new colonies in the Americas.

This is the plantation citadel -

they'll receive a million acres of prime real estate...

Formally O'Cahan's country -

County Coleraine, County Londonderry -

on condition that they build these walls,

that they construct this cathedral, which is the first purposely-built

Protestant cathedral in these islands,

and that they arm these walls.

The gun that we are lying on now is one of what is the finest collection

of early modern ordinance in these islands, indeed, in Western Europe.

Can you tell me what is happening just before the London Companies arrive?

What is the, sort of, political situation and the conflict

that is just preceding their arrival or their settlement?

I suppose the London Companies arrive here at the end of what

historians would know as the Tudor conquests

or the English reconquest of Ireland.

And it is no surprise that this becomes the plantation citadel.

Essentially, Britannia rules the waves,

but England's wooden walls are full of holes.

England has not got the virgin forests that are necessary

to fit out shapes of the line,

and when the London Companies are being showed around,

rather like when Potemkin brings Catherine the Great through the Crimea,

they don't show them the bogs or the mountains,

they show them the fisheries. They show them the virgin forests.

They show them the good land.

And in some ways the London Companies are an early modern equivalent of Haliburton.

You know, it is about security.

It is about religion, but it is also about profit, and the merchants

of London, the London Companies are in the business of making money.

So this area becomes the sort of Jacobean timber outfitters?

Yeah, fish, timber... land is also important.

Political power in the early modern period

whether you are in England, Scotland or Ireland

is predicated on property and, you know, this was a place,

Ireland was a place, where men could become rich.

But gaining those riches proved problematic for the new settlers

living outside the City.

Each of the 12 London Company estates was far greater in size

than had been promised.

Raven's maps showed newly-built villages

placed on vast tracts of land.

And each one was required to have a manor house with a defensive wall,

known as a "bawn."

The names and locations of many -

like the village built by the Vintners at Bellaghy -

have survived.

But very little is left of the picturesque buildings

shown on Raven's maps.

There is a huge gulf between Raven's map

and the village as it now stands today.

There is certainly no timber-framed houses,

but there are some fascinating clues to the original settlement.

This is Castle Street and up there is the bawn.

And there is the church, which is there.

Now, that is probably not the original church, but probably

standing on the original foundations of the church that we can see here.

So there is a sense in which the skeleton of the village

is here on Raven's map, 400 years ago.

And the gap between the present day and the past narrows most of all

when visiting what remains of Bellaghy Bawn.

I'm really struck by the sense of the elegant

simplicity of this space, standing here in the courtyard of the bawn.

There is the tower,

the original tower that you can see on Raven's map.

There is a real feeling about keeping people in here,

but it is also a fortification.

Another sense is about keeping people out.

Soon after their arrival,

the London Companies came face-to-face

with the difficulties of trying to establish a colony

in a territory which was both hostile

and super-sized beyond their expectations.

The Vintners were granted something like 3,500 acres, supposedly.

But the actual estate is something like 32,000 acres!

JERRY LAUGHS

You see, whilst the mapmakers were very good

at spatial relationships,

they weren't very good at measurement.

I suppose you might think, "Hooray!" but then you might also think,

-"There's some problems there."

-The men in London sitting there,

looking at the maps, they were living in a virtual world.

And they didn't really understand, I think, what was going on.

And the native Irish, where are they in this whole process of plantation?

Well, they are supposed to be taken off the land and moved elsewhere.

They were, for example, supposed to be moved to the church land

but they weren't.

The fact is, there were not enough settlers in the early days

to move them away.

Raven's Book Of Maps shows the complex

relationship between the new settlers and the native population.

He writes that many "murders and robberies" have been committed.

And yet, Raven also lists 145 natives living alongside

the 52 British men and three freeholders on this portion alone.

The London Companies had discovered they could not

fulfil their requirement to clear the Irish off the land.

By 1630, less than 2,000 colonists had arrived in the area.

The lands were simply too vast to manage without the labour

and rents of the Irish.

Maps of other portions draw attention to unfinished castles

and half-built houses,

and bawns even being used as cowsheds.

And this highlighting of the plantation's flaws and shortcomings,

reveals the true purpose of this book of maps.

Raven created it at the request of Sir Thomas Phillips,

a man with a grudge against the London Companies.

The book would subsequently be used as evidence in a controversial trial

which took place in London after the death of King James I

when his son Charles succeeded him to the throne.

What is it that goes wrong with the Ulster Plantation

under Charles' reign?

Well, basically,

the plantation is just too tempting a target for Charles' government.

Charles is financially highly embarrassed in the 1630s,

he is desperate for money and the Ulster Plantation offers

one means of getting at it, by bringing London down.

Over the previous 15 years,

London has acquired some very powerful enemies.

One of the leading enemies in Ulster is Sir Thomas Phillips

who became a thorn in the flesh of the whole city's project.

Well, Phillips had been the Governor of Coleraine

and he is displaced, to make way for the London project

and, basically,

makes it his career to construct a case against the City,

to prove that they haven't fulfilled the terms of the articles

of plantation, to prove that they haven't provided

the settlers that the Crown had required.

Raven himself, possibly, had his own grievances against the Londoners

and that agenda is being pursued to some extent through the maps,

which are an indictment of the City's failure.

So this is a crucial moment in English history, isn't it?

The Crown is putting the City on trial?

Yes, and it is part of a wider process

under Charles of subjecting the City to immense pressure.

What was the outcome of the trial?

First of all, a swingeing fine of £70,000

AND the estates are confiscated.

The City has lost those estates,

in which it has invested huge amounts of money.

London is really alienated by the way it is being treated

over the plantation.

And when Charles becomes really desperate for money,

in the great crisis of his monarchy in 1639-1640,

when he is facing rebellion in Scotland,

then the City pretty consistently refuses to lend him money.

So 1639-1640 becomes payback time for Charles.

This seemingly modest book of maps actually captures

an extraordinary moment in Ulster history,

when the London Companies create a little bit of England in Ireland.

But it is more than that.

It sets London's merchants against the King

and one of the consequences of that are the civil wars of the 1640s,

and ultimately, the death of a King.

In 1649, Charles I is executed.

The confiscated lands were later returned to the London Companies.

The buildings seen on Raven's map did not survive the turbulent years

of rebellion and conflict in Ulster that followed.

If maps are indeed the eye of history,

then the legacy of Jobson, Bartlett, Bodley

and Raven allow us to see the landscape and population

of early 17th-century Ulster in the midst of a profound transformation.

And what they tell us

is that the traces of Ulster from 400 years ago are still with us

to this day, and they enable us

to begin to grasp what Ulster is all about,

in its complex landscape and its cultures

and, to all of this, it is the maps that bear witness.

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