Irish Historic Towns Atlases available online

Following from the success of our pilot Irish Historic Towns Atlas (IHTA) Kilkenny online, IHTA atlases nos 1 to 25 will be made available freely online over the coming months. The cover, general abbreviations, select bibliography, essay, topographical information, maps 1, 2 and 3 as well as a growth map, will be freely available and word searchable to read online or to download. 

As the nature of the project is comparative urban studies, the first batch to be released are the towns of monastic origins: IHTA no. 1 Kildare by J.H. Andrews, IHTA no. 4 Kells by Anngret Simms, IHTA no. 8 Downpatrick by R.H. Buchanan and Anthony Wilson, IHTA no. 18 Armagh by Catherine McCullough and W.H. Crawford and IHTA no. 20 Tuam by J.A. Claffey. It also comes with an excerpt on Irish towns of monastic origin from Reading the maps: a guide to the Irish Historic Towns Atlas by Jacinta Prunty and H.B. Clarke (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2011).

Towns of monastic origin are available to view here.

• Viking towns (Dublin, part I to 1610 and Limerick) will be freely available from mid-November 2016.
• Anglo-Norman towns I (Carrickfergus, Athlone, Kilkenny and Fethard) will be available from mid-December 2016.
• Anglo-Norman towns II (Mullingar, Trim, Carlingford and Sligo) will be available from mid-January 2017.
• Towns of early modern and plantation origin (Bandon, Belfast, part I to 1840, Derry~Londonderry, Longford and Ennis) will be available from mid-February 2017.
• Towns in the eighteenth century (Maynooth, Dundalk, Dublin part II, 1610 to 1756) will be available from mid-March 2017.
• Towns in the nineteenth century (Bray, Belfast part II, 1840 to 1900) will be available from mid-April 2017.

This project is in collaboration with Eneclann (Geneaology and History Research Services) who very kindly scanned all of the back catalogue of Irish Historic Towns Atlases to create the word searchable pdfs. 

A very special thanks to Derek Cosgrave in IT for bringing the project together under very tight deadines.