Thomas Raven's Clandeboye Estate Maps Map Man

I'm above Strangford Lough in County Down, Northern Ireland.

It's a peaceful landscape, with fertile hills rolling down to a great sea lough.

But 400 years ago, this Catholic land was suddenly colonised.

Back in the 1600s, this was a land which attracted

adventurers who came from Scotland and England, to enjoy a better life.

To the native Irish these Protestant colonists were invaders

intent on stealing their land.

They arrived in droves.

50,000 in Ulster by the 1620s

and the Troubles of today have their roots in this plantation period.

It took an enterprising map maker to come and map the estate here and Thomas Raven was certainly that.

Raven's maps are beautiful and astonishingly detailed,

accurate pictures they give of this troubled land.

For the colonists, Ireland was a country up for grabs that made

map making difficult and not just because the Irish were hostile.

There is a secret story behind these maps.

The story about rival landowners more concerned with their

Protestant neighbours than with the Catholics they dispossessed.

Thomas Raven's Clandeboye maps were designed to help James Hamilton manage his new estate in Ulster.

A set of 75 sheets, Clandeboye covered 64,000 acres.

Never before had the layout and boundaries,

the land farmed by tenants, even the possibilities for development

be mapped in such precise details.

This was a picture of the new settled world.

At the heart of the new estate was this building, Killyleagh Castle,

it's instantly recognisable from Raven's drawing.

What a spectacular place.

This was the mansion that Hamilton took over from the great Catholic chieftain, Conn O'Neill.

In 1605 Hamilton was the beneficiary of James I's policy of planting

new Protestant landowners on Irish Catholic lands.

James Hamilton was the first Viscount of Clandeboye and he was a great landowner himself.

Hamilton came originally from Ayrshire in Scotland and he was one of James the I's spies.

He looks the part, doesn't he? The King's reward for this skulduggery,

a huge slice of the north of Ireland.

The Ulster Plantation, as these new estates were called,

had started, not very successfully, in Elizabeth I's reign.

But it was in the early 1600s that it really took off.

Thomas Raven was born around 1574.

He was probably English but he made his career in Ulster.

These maps were begun in 1625, the year James I died.

Were the two events perhaps connected?

For 20 years Hamilton had been arguing with his Protestant neighbour Hugh Montgomery

about their shared boundaries.

In 1623, an enquiry ordered by King James I had failed to resolve the dispute,

so two years later when James died,

Hamilton would have been extremely worried that the incoming King Charles I would also intervene.

Possibly even take Montgomery's side.

Hamilton needed Raven's maps to stake his claim.

Hamilton and Montgomery were typical of the new ambitious colonists

struggling to establish large estates in Ireland.

But Hamilton had an advantage. In Raven he had found one of the country's experienced surveyors.

This might look a terrible mess, but in actual fact, all these maps make

complete geographical sense, they all fit together.

Despite the fact that some of them, like this one here, are upside down with the south at the top.

Raven has framed each map to describe a particular parcel of land.

He never meant all these maps to be fitted together.

So to make sense of it myself I've transferred the location

of all Raven's maps onto modern maps, so I can see what's what.

So we've got the south side of Hamilton's estate here running up the west side of Strangford Lough.

The rest of Hamilton's estate ran up here through Dundonald, Comber just here,

and along the south side of Belfast Lough into Belfast.

Fascinating thing is the way that Hamilton's land

is surrounded on all sides by those of other landowners, in particular, Montgomery. Look at this.

This is Montgomery's land here and here, with Hamilton's land here.

And the big question is, did Raven get those borders right?

Time to start my journey.

What I'm hoping to do is to trace Hamilton's estate

from its southernmost tip all the way north to Belfast.

I will be using Raven's 400-year-old maps.

So finding old boundaries like 17th-century woods and rivers will be no walk in the park.

Raven shows much of Hamilton's estate bordering Strangford Lough

which Raven gives the old Irish name of Lough Cone.

At the southern end is Gibbs Island.

What really strikes me, walking around

the fields and woods of Northern Ireland is how easy it is for me.

400 years ago none of this land was drained.

It would have been thick woods, bogs everywhere. No proper roads.

You would have been on foot. Probably used a horse now and again.

It would have been very hard work. You must have been fit.

Raven would have mapped this island shortly after the death of James I.

During his reign, James's Plantation policy had provided

Raven with a lot of work, and Raven hoped that the new King Charles I would make him King's own measurer.

But Charles turned him down and that's the reason why Raven

took on a lot of private work and the Clandeboye Estate.

From here Raven only had 100 square miles to go.

Piece of cake really.

If you look at Raven's map of Lough Cone

you can't help noticing the care he put into the channels and islands

and most intriguingly Ringhaddy. Why did Raven think it was so significant?

The Protestant settlers like Hamilton and Montgomery didn't feel too secure in their adopted homeland

so they built themselves new castles and towers and enlarged old ones.

All to keep themselves safe.

For Raven the most impressive was at Ringhaddy.

The present owner of Ringhaddy is Sir Dennis Faulkner.

Dennis, we are just off your house and right beside it is the castle showing Raven's map.

-When was the castle built?

-Around 1450,

as a single-storey building.

It was raised up to the height it now is, which is four storeys, I suppose.

Three in about 1602.

So it would have been quite impressive in those days.

Yes, it was a tower house, I think is how it was referred to.

It did have something like 30 soldiers based there,

Scottish and English soldiers up to 1780.

How important was Ringhaddy in the 1600s?

Pretty important because the west side only has Strangford

at the entrance as a town, a very old town, with Customs House and so on then Killyleagh

about four or five miles north of that.

So this is one of the three most important places on Strangford Lough?

-Well, certainly on the west side.

-So any tenant renting this island

from Hamilton would have known that not only had he a castle but also a good mooring as well.

Safe anchorage and a place where you could load and discharge ships in any weather.

Ringhaddy was a crucial trading post.

Hamilton would have expected Raven to map it with care.

So was the mapping of Strangford Lough an exception

or did Raven take equal care with the whole estate?

On a page like this you would see the essence of what Raven was trying to achieve for Hamilton.

It's just another page in a book

but it's a particularly beautiful and detailed one.

There are footbridges marked on it

and even individual gateposts.

Gateways through fields, two circles connected by a thin line.

It's a map which describes the economical potential of this part of the estate.

For example, there is a smith's forge here, there is the harbour down here, there is a small herd

of very beautiful deer marked here surrounded by the perimeter of the park.

And of course deer, in those days, had huge economic value

but so did rabbits and that's because a rabbit warren

had economic value, both as a source of fur and of food.

Here they are, gathered by the seashore, six of them,

by a label saying Coneyburrow, and the size just over five acres,

The rabbit warren beside the bay.

Now this map tells every tenant where their plot of land is,

for example there is a road here, so a tenant called Robert Hogg

will know that his plot of land lies on the left hand side of the road.

His neighbour is John Padden, below there we've got...

someone called Duncan Read, John Ross, Alexander Stuart, a lot of Scottish names.

They can come to this map and find out exactly where their parcel of land is.

For Hamilton, he could look at this map, find out where his tenants were

and how much they should be paying for the land they are renting.

This is a set of money-making maps.

What strikes you looking through these maps is how few signs of Catholic habitation there are.

Perhaps not surprising, when you consider that in the 1600s

land owned by Catholics in Ireland declined from over 80% to just 14%.

But the situation here on Hamilton's estate was slightly different.

There are very few Irish settlements on these maps, but not because they had all been driven away,

it's because this was a very under-populated part of Ireland in the first place.

On this particular map there are two groups of three Irish houses

that appear to have a thatched roof on them and they look very remote on the shores of Lough Clay.

It's a very beautiful map and one that's entirely about boundaries.

Indeed, defining boundaries was absolutely key.

It was the absence of mapped boundaries that had led to

the costly dispute between Hamilton and his neighbour Montgomery.

Tomorrow, I am going to find out how Raven tackled Hamilton's land

to the west of the Lough, in particular, this area, Balle McCossan,

where Hamilton's land is hemmed in on three sides by Montgomery's.

With so much at stake, how could Raven fix the boundaries so that they were beyond dispute?

Well, I have married up the boundary on Raven's map with

a modern Ordnance Survey map and the two fit together amazingly well.

I am standing at Lusky Bridge, here on the modern Ordnance Survey map,

and I can see very clearly how this tip of the arrowhead river shape

on Raven's map is this arrowhead shape on the modern Ordnance Survey.

So if I follow the river in this direction south-west,

and just here it turns up and halfway up this stretch here

is another bridge, nowadays called Florida Bridge.

So if I can follow Raven's river from Lusky Bridge

down here to Florida Bridge, I will be right on the boundary

between Montgomery's land and Hamilton's land.

Big question - did Raven actually map it accurately?

The only one way to find out is to follow it.

Well, the banks are pretty overgrown so it's going to be on with the waders.

By 1625, these two powerful men had reached a pitch of mutual hatred.

Montgomery was undoubtedly the grander figure.

He had been a landowner before coming to Ireland.

But Hamilton had the King's ear.

Montgomery felt Hamilton had acquired his estate fraudulently

by telling the King that Montgomery's holding was just too much for one man.

To make it worse for Montgomery, Hamilton had managed to get the better land.

Florida Bridge, right where it should be.

Now, the line of the River Blackwater carries on in a north-westerly direction

but that's not what Raven's boundary does.

That turns another corner and heads south-west,

yet Raven suggests it's still following a stretch of water.

I've got to get up to that corner now to see what the river does there.

Well, I've reached the bend in the boundary between the two estates.

The boundary comes up the Blackwater here then turns south up this tiny stream.

Everything on that side belonged to Montgomery, everything on that side belonged to Hamilton.

What amazes me is that such insignificant

geographical features can be used to mark such an important boundary.

Off north now to the front line.

Cumber, a town founded by Montgomery,

and it was there that an interesting twist in the story occurred.

Raven's maps seemed to show a new development to Cumber

on the eastern side of the river and that was Hamilton's land.

Well, I'm pretty sure I'm in the right place.

Old Cumber's back that way and new Cumber is just through these trees.

Except that it's gone, vanished.

Something very odd here.

Where are all the houses?

Raven marks 20 houses clustered around two streets meeting in a T-junction just here.

But there's not a wall to be seen, not even a bump in the ground.

There's nothing but level fields.

If the address you're after disappears the first people to contact are the locals.

So I fixed a meeting with Cumber historian Glen Ball to see if he knows where the village has gone.

I was pretty shocked when I came into this field and found absolutely no houses at all.

I was too when I first started to study the area and the fact I couldn't find anything,

no tangible evidence at all, led me to believe that there may not even have been a village here.

And another thing is that a lot of the maps that I have been looking through over,

you know, over that space of time since 1625, they don't show any sign of a village settlement at all.

-So Raven was the only person to map this town?

-It seems so, yes.

James Hamilton may have asked him to do this, because Hamilton wanted a bit more fame for himself

and he wanted to build a village which was opposed to the old town of Cumber which is just over the river.

That farmhouse is called New Cumber House. Could that be a remnant of the village?

Well, I think it's almost certainly named after the village, the proposed village of New Cumber.

It may have been named that simply because of the history of the old Raven map.

Is it possible that New Cumber was actually built but then disappeared shortly afterwards?

I suppose anything could be possible but to me it would be doubtful

that such a large establishment would just disappear

completely off the face of the Earth.

Has anyone conducted a survey to find out whether a building is just below the surface of the field?

No, certainly not that I know of and it would be a wonderful idea if somebody did.

It would sort the thing out once and for all.

For a relatively small sum it's possible to do

what's called a geophysical survey of subterranean evidence.

That's what archaeologists do all the time.

If there are any structures down there, Claire Stevens and Fiona Robertson will find them.

James Hamilton could not, of course, have run the Clandeboye Estate by himself.

Like other colonists he brought over Protestant friends

and family from the mainland and rented them plots of land to farm.

And they needed new villages to live in.

So could New Cumber have been Hamilton's way

of saying to Montgomery, "I'm here to stay and this is my new village right on your doorstep"?

Claire and Fiona have a full day's work ahead of them

so while they are busy I'm going to check out a bit more of Raven's map.

As well as sorting out Hamilton's boundaries with Montgomery's estate

Raven had to map the individual parcels of land belonging to Hamilton's tenants.

So what are the features Raven used?

Up here in Ballywallon

is the boundary between Ballywallon just here

and the neighbouring parcel of land, Ballyallegan, here.

And the boundary seems to be fixed on a bend in the river just here.

What looks like a green volcano here and a long thin lough just here.

The only trouble is none of those three features seem to be marked on the modern Ordnance Survey map.

With the village gone missing and no sign on the map of the lough or the green thing

I'm beginning to wonder how much of the map may have disappeared.

What I am hoping is that the bend in the river

will give me a bearing on the green volcano

and perhaps from there I can locate the lough.

Well, the bend in the river's just over there.

Now according to Raven this mysterious green volcano is due south of here.

Up there. This is an old map suddenly come alive.

What this might be up on the hilltop ahead

is a rath -

that's an Irish homestead.

And if it is a rath, there ought to be a ditch in the steep bank.

Oh, oh!

Well, I've reached to top of the hill. What is this great overgrown lump?

Could it be a rath? I'm going to creep inside and have a look.

Well, there very steep bank here dropping down.

A very steep bank!

Wow. It's a good...

10 or 12 feet high

and it's made of rocks.

Look, this is man made, it's definitely a rath.

This is what Raven marked on his map, the green volcano revealed.

Extraordinary.

Here's Raven using a 2,000-year-old man-made landmark to fix his boundary.

And he probably didn't know it was one of the earliest settlements in Ireland.

Now, what about that lough?

Going from the river and the rath, it's so close that I should be able to see it

but I can't.

This is the sort of thing that requires local help.

Will Armstrong's family have been farming this land for three generations.

If anyone knows if there is a lough hereabouts, he should.

Will, have you got a lake on your land or anything like it?

No, there's no lakes or anything, but we have a bog, so we have.

But it's got water. How long has that water been there?

That water there only appeared when we were trying to get across to

those fields over there with a path for the cows and we put landfill in

and we thought we were just going to just have vegetation and maybe a couple of feet of water.

We pushed it in and pushed it in and worked away steady for about a week and then we went away one lunchtime

and when we came back out after lunchtime, gone, nothing.

Just fell through the vegetation?

Hm-mm, it fell through the surface and totally disappeared out of sight.

How much soil was that?

We would reckon maybe 1,000, 1,500 ton of soil.

1,500 tons of soil disappeared in one lunch break?!

One lunch break, just out of sight.

How big is the bog?

It goes to past thon tree, the tallest oak tree you see on the far side,

and right back to... You see all those small houses on that side there?

Well, what's that, that's about 700 yards?

Roughly something around that direction, it would be, yeah.

Can we find out how deep it is?

We could push down through and see.

-Shall we have a go at it?

-No problem.

OK, if you give me that.

There's one bit, where is the...?

Yup, the bit with the twirly end, yup.

This water absolutely stinks.

Whoa ho! There you go, here's the other one.

Is it still going down?

Oh, yes, we're going now. Ooh.

What, these are all about three feet long, aren't they?

-Yup, they are indeed.

-There's only two more sections to go, Will.

I've only got one more bit left after this.

Well, we'll see how it goes.

What happens if you fall in one of these?

I don't want to try and find out.

It's still going.

How amazing!

Well, if this one goes down,

this is the best part of 20 feet, isn't it?

21 feet down to the handle.

OK, let's see where it goes.

I do not believe it.

-21 feet.

-It's still going. Have you hit the bottom?

No, still going.

So if there is 21 feet right here on the edge, that means it really was a big body of water once.

-Definitely so, yes.

-Well, it's the right length and the right width.

I think you've found Raven's lost lough.

Well, that's news to me. We never had a lough, we always had a bog.

I never cease to be amazed by the way landscapes carry their histories.

400 years might seem a very long time

but all these features that Raven marked on his map are still here to be found.

So, I know what happened to the vanishing lough.

I wonder how they are getting on with that vanished village.

Have you found anything?

-We certainly have. We found the missing village.

-That's fantastic!

Yep, let me just orientate you.

Along here is the modern road and this would be the bridge here.

This is the stream

and this square enclosure here which is about 15 metres square

on the correct alignment that matches the map, that's an individual habitation plot.

There would have been a house within that. We've no evidence of the house

and we don't know what the houses were made of.

If they were made of wood they would leave no signal,

so it's just someone who is just marking out the plots of land and maybe digging a ditch

and then material has been put into that ditch which is what is producing the response.

What is interesting, is this L-shaped thing which you can see here,

possibly corresponds to this, two bowed plots here

and that means that this is the side street.

It's just a huge relief to know that Raven's map is vindicated.

This wasn't an invented or a planned town at all. It actually existed.

-Yeah.

-That's very exciting.

-And you're the first person to see it.

-I'm very honoured too.

It's terrific to know that I'm the first Cumber man to know that there was a village of New Cumber here.

I can't believe it, honestly!

Well, that's a Mapman first -

rediscovering a village from a map.

The most likely explanation for New Cumber's disappearance is that like

other fledgling communities in Ulster, it ceased to be economically viable and died.

Last leg now and I am passing through present day Dundonel, shown by Raven as a picturesque village.

He could have little realised that 400 years on

the Protestant presence here would be still politically charged.

And this is virtually journey's end.

I am approaching Belfast.

Back in 1625, this was the northern edge of Hamilton's estate.

Today it's the vast Harland and Wolff Shipyard where the Titanic was built.

No other piece of land that Raven mapped is quite so unrecognisable.

Thomas Raven's maps of the Clandeboye Estate are maps of occupation.

They appear to be just a record of the estates, fields, rivers and boundaries.

But they wouldn't look as they do if it hadn't been for aggressive colonisation.

Like many of the colonists Raven was a courageous opportunist.

The estate mapping in Ireland was to make him his fortunes.

Subtitles by BBC Broadcast 2005

E-mail us at [email protected]