General View of the County Wicklow (1801)
Book ID: 69245
Price: €595.00
General View of the County Wicklow. The Agriculture and Mineralogy, Present State and Circumstances of the County Wicklow, with Observations on the Means of their Improvement, Drawn up for the Consideration of The Dublin Society by Robert Fraser. Dublin: Graisberry & Campbell, 1801. First Edition. Pp, 284. Rebound in quarter vellum marbled boards, title label to spineA very good copy.
Illustrated with a large coloured folded frontispiece map of Co. Wicklow. The third of the Dublin Society’s surveys, only 150 copies were printed, making it one of the rarest of these surveys.
The agricultural system in Wicklow reflected the same tenancy system across the island of Ireland . In ancients times the dominat clans in Wicklow had been the O’Byrnes and the O’Tooles before the Norman conquest. After the Cromwellian and Williamite Wars an Anglo-Irish Protestant elite controlled the majority of the land in the county and the majority of the Catholic Gaelic Irish were dispossessed and reduced to poverty. With the discovery of ore in the area of Glendalough and Glendasan, where an engineer named Thomas Weaver found lead and other metals, mining continued through the 19th century until the mid-20th century.
The Irish Statistical Survey was carried out under the direction of the Royal Dublin Society. Each county was surveyed with the aim of determining the ‘actual state, capabilities and defects of agriculture, manufactures and rural economy’. In practice the surveys contained a vast quantity of local information on almost every aspect of the county surveyed.
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