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Carl Ferdinand Weiland’s finely engraved map of Ireland, issued by the Geographisches Institut at Weimar in 1827, offers a distinctly continental reading of the island at the close of the Georgian era. Every county boundary is picked out with crisp line-work, while a wash of delicate outline colour separates the four historic provinces, revealing at a glance the political geography that pre-dated the Act of Union. The draughtsman’s dense network of place-names reaches far beyond the market towns usually found on English maps of the period: minor parishes, fishing villages, and inland estates crowd the hachured terrain, illustrating the Institute’s ambition to match the statistical thoroughness of contemporary French cartography.
A small inset key in the southeast quadrant explains the graduated symbols that rank settlements by population, from provincial capitals of 100,000 inhabitants and more to villages of under 500, alongside icons for forts, castles, abbeys, and lighthouses. The key’s careful phrasing reflects the rise of German comparative geography, which sought to quantify national space through uniform categories that could be applied from the Rhine to the Shannon. Three parallel scale bars, calibrated in German, English, and Irish miles, reinforce that international outlook and invite direct comparison with British sources.
Produced less than a decade before the tithe and valuation surveys transformed Irish mapping, the plate captures the island on the eve of profound social and economic change. It stands as an early nineteenth-century synthesis of Enlightenment precision, German statistical method, and the lingering administrative geography of the Kingdom of Ireland, all rendered with the elegant clarity that made Weiland’s “Hand-Atlas” a standard reference for scholars and travellers across Europe.
