1573

Ortelius

Neighbouring septs: “O: Conner Slego” “O: bowey” “O: Mad Jame” “O: Conner Roo”

Abraham Ortelius's first map of Ireland, published in Antwerp as part of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum — the first modern world atlas. Oriented with west at the top, following the Mercator 1564 wall-map model. On the Sligo coast the engraver marks the Bay of Slego and labels several Connacht ruling families by O-prefixed name, inaugurating the cartographic convention that would later place O Dondey on the maps of Boazio and Speed. The O'Dubhda themselves are not yet named.

1595

Mercator & Hondius

No family label — sets the geographic template.

The most detailed map of Ireland of its period. Issued posthumously by Jodocus Hondius from Gerard Mercator's plates, and continued through the Mercator-Hondius atlases for decades afterward. Based substantially on the 1567–1571 surveys of Robert Lythe — the first English state mapping of Connacht. The detailed north-Connacht coastline and river system on this map set the template that later English cartographers (Boazio 1606, Speed 1610) would annotate with our name.

c.1600

Baxter & Boazioa spy's eye view

On the map: “Co. of Slego” “Tirones Cowntry” “Orowercks” “3 Spanish Shippes cast away”

Hand-drawn in watercolour and ink, this is a working intelligence map — compiled by the English captain John Baxter from direct observation and finished in Antwerp by Baptista Boazio. The cartouche lists the territories covered: “the most parte of O'Donnells contre, part of Tirones, part of McGuyres, part of Orowercks: all of the Co. of Slego, part of McWillms and parte of the Co. of Roscomon.” Drawn in the warring years before the Battle of Kinsale (1601), it records towers, churches and roads as Baxter himself rode through them — a rare snapshot of unconquered Gaelic Sligo, with the three Spanish Armada wrecks at Streedagh marked just off the coast. The sheet is oriented with north to the left, so our country — the Sligo coast and the mouth of the Moy — runs along the right-hand edge, a dense clutch of castle towers set between the Ox Mountains and Killala Bay. The original is held at Royal Museums Greenwich as part of the Dartmouth Collection; a framed copy is on public display at Parke's Castle, where many visitors first meet it.

1606

Boazio★ names the family

On the map: “O Dondey” “Arras Dondenell” “Co. Slego”

Baptista Boazio's map of Ireland, engraved in Antwerp by Joannes Baptista Vrients for the final edition of Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Labels O Dondey on the Sligo coast beside Arras Dondenell (Ardnarea / Dún Néill), within the county marked Co. Slego. Its Latin key, the Expositio Verborum Hibernicorum, explicitly declares O — Caput familiae: the prefix O denotes the head of the family. Few early European maps state the Gaelic sept-system quite so plainly.

1610

Speed★ names the family

On the map: “O Dondey” “Arras Dondenell” “SLEGO COUNTY” “Moy flu”

John Speed's map of Connacht — the first detailed English atlas map of the west of Ireland. Engraved by Jodocus Hondius and published in Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611–12). O Dondey is lettered on the Sligo coast inside SLEGO COUNTY, between Arras Dondenell (Ardnarea) and Port Nahaly, with the River Moy (“Moy flu”) running east of the chief's name. The strongest early English attestation of the O'Dubhda name on a printed map.

1657

Down Surveythe whole barony

On the map: “Tireragh” “Dromard” “Skreen” “Templeboy” “Easkey” “Killeragh”

The barony sheet from Petty's Down Survey — a hand-painted working document drawn between 1656 and 1658, showing the whole of Tireragh: the heartland of the O'Dubhda, running along the south shore of Killala Bay and Sligo Bay from the Moy eastward to the Carbury border. The surveyor has picked out each parish (Dromard, Skreen, Templeboy, Easkey, Killeragh) and every townland boundary, with a distinctive green-stipple flourish for the mountain spine of the Ox Mountains (Slewdaffe) and a red-hatched coastline.

The accompanying description, preserved in the Down Survey terriers, describes Tireragh and Carbury as “lying upon the sea coast, devided from the barony of Tirerill . . . by a great mountaine” — a small window into how the surveyors understood the landscape we still walk today.

1659

Down Surveylocates Ardnaree

On the map: “Ardnaree” “Kilmoremoy” “Tireragh”

Parish №33 of the Tireragh barony sheet — zooming in to the east bank of the Moy, where the surveyors platted the townland of Ardnaree, the ancestral O'Dubhda stronghold across the river from Ballina, together with its forfeited landholdings under the Cromwellian settlement. Combined with the accompanying written terriers (the Books of Survey & Distribution), this map is the key cartographic source for locating the site of Ardnarea Castle — long remembered in tradition but not pinned to the ground until recent local research tied the Down Survey evidence to the surviving field features.

1695

Morden

A snapshot after the Williamite settlement — no family labels, but the county survives.

Robert Morden's general map of Ireland, engraved for the 1695 edition of Camden's Britannia — the first major atlas of the British Isles to reach a wide English readership. By this date the Gaelic sept-labels of Boazio and Speed have been scrubbed away: Morden shows counties, baronies, and walled towns, but not the families who had lost the land. What remains for us is the County of Slego outline with Killaly, Ballina, Castleconner, Dromore and Skreen all shown by name — a quiet cartographic record of the moment our territory passed finally into new hands after the Williamite War.

1778

Taylor & Skinnerplate 221

On the map: “Sligo” “Ballysadare” “Collooney” “Temple House” “Tobercurry” “Balleara”

Plate 221 of Taylor & Skinner's Maps of the Roads of Ireland (surveyed 1777, published 1778) — a strip-map at approximately one inch to two English miles, showing the coach road from Sligo south through Ballysadare, Collooney, Balleara and Tobercurry to Castlebar, and a parallel branch by Swinford. The gentlemen's seats of the post-plantation gentry are marked in tiny italic — Temple House (one of the later estates in our country), Aghanagh Ch., Ballintogher — giving us the eighteenth-century face of O'Dubhda territory as the new ruling class drew it for travellers.

1797

Beaufort

On the map: “Tirreragh” “Tirawly” “Killala” “Ballina”

The Rev. Daniel Augustus Beaufort's two-sheet map of Ireland, published in London by William Faden and Dublin by William Allen — the most accurate whole-island map of the eighteenth century and the immediate reference for the first Ordnance Survey a generation later. Beaufort draws every barony outline by name: our territory appears as Tirreragh in Sligo and Tirawly in Mayo, with the dioceses of Killala and Achonry overlaid for the ecclesiastical layer that gives the map its title. Not a family attestation, but the most complete picture of the administrative Tír Fhiachrach that anyone had drawn before the OS.

1844

O'Donovan & Mac FhirbhisighO’Dowda’s Country

On the map: “O’Dowda” “Tír Fhiachrach” “Tír Amhalghaidh” “Hy-Fiachrach”

The frontispiece map of the Irish Archaeological Society's 1844 edition of The Genealogies, Tribes, and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach, commonly called O'Dowda's Country — John O'Donovan's translation and commentary on the seventeenth-century compilation by Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, drawn in turn from the fourteenth-century Book of Lecan. Every territory is lettered in Irish script: Tír Fhiachrach and Tír Amhalghaidh (the two halves of Hy-Fiachrach), together with Cera, Coran, Luighne, Gailenga, Umhall, Irrus Domhnann, Sliabh Lugha, Cúl Ó bhFinn, and at the heart of it the kingship seat of the O'Dubhda on the lower Moy. Unlike the colonial maps above, this is not a contemporary attestation — it is the first time the medieval territory was reconstructed on paper, worked out from the genealogies themselves.

1990

Mac Halethe 20 castles

On the map: “O’Dubhda” “Tír Fhiachrach” “Tír Amhalghaidh”

Conor Mac Hale's working map from The O’Dubhda Family History (1990) — twenty numbered pins placed over a mid-twentieth-century touring map of north Connacht (Bartholomew Ireland, Sheet 5), each marking an O’Dubhda castle or stronghold across Tír Fhiachrach and Tír Amhalghaidh. Mac Hale's inventory is the single most-referenced modern index of the castles and the starting point for almost every castle page on this site, including our Castle Tour and the Lost Castles page for the sites that remain unlocated or unverified.

A note on what the map does and does not say: several of the twenty pins mark later buildings standing near, but not on, the original castle site — and a handful are sites for which the castle itself has never been located on the ground. Mac Hale's map is a research index, not a field survey. A full archaeological re-survey of the O’Dubhda territory has not been carried out since.