1783 Taylor & Skinner Dundalk, Newry, Castlebellingham & Dromiskin, Ireland Road Map
This hand-coloured antique Irish road map, published in 1783, is Map 4 from the second revised edition of Taylor & Skinner’s Maps of the Roads of Ireland. Surveyed in 1777 and corrected down to 1783, it is presented as two adjoining strip maps on a single engraved sheet, following the historic road through Castlebellingham, Dromiskin, Lurgangreen, Dundalk, Jonesborough and Newry, across Counties Louth, Armagh and Down.
The left-hand strip follows the route north through County Louth, beginning around Castlebellingham and continuing by Dromiskin, Lurgangreen and Dundalk before extending towards Jonesborough. Numerous side roads, churches, country houses and estates are marked along the way, including roads towards Ardee, Carlingford and Carrickmacross.
Dundalk is one of the most prominent places on the sheet, shown beside the coastal inlet with its surrounding streets, connecting roads and nearby landed properties clearly engraved. Among the named places and properties in this section are Mountpleasant, Priorland, Haggardstown and Clermont, together with several contemporary landowners.
The right-hand strip continues the route through the border country around Newry, where the road network becomes especially rich in detail. The engraving shows roads leading towards Downpatrick, Rostrevor, Carlingford, Narrow Water and Armagh, together with turnpikes, waterways, hills, churches, bridges and named estates.
Several local features add particular interest to the Newry section, including Sheep Bridge, Donoughmore Church, Ballintaggart, Trianont and the clearly engraved road junctions around the town itself. The map also marks the county transitions with the inscriptions “Enter Armagh Co.” and “Enter Down Co.”, making the historic relationship between the adjoining counties especially clear.
The side-by-side strip arrangement allows a long section of road to be shown on a single page while retaining the mile-by-mile format characteristic of Taylor & Skinner’s survey. As throughout the series, the map also includes numerous named country houses, estates and landowners, giving it added value for Irish local history, genealogy and family-history research.
The large engraved county names and marked county boundaries make this sheet particularly useful as a record of the late-18th-century road connections between County Louth, County Armagh and County Down.
Identified as Map 4 in Taylor & Skinner’s Maps of the Roads of Ireland, it forms part of their extensive late-18th-century survey of Ireland’s principal roads.