ABSTRACT
The text which here appears in print for the first time is one of a series of accounts of more than twenty Irish counties, in whole or in part, commissioned by the Dublin writer and scientist William Molyneux in the years 1682-5.' Molyneux (1656-98), who in 1683 was a co-founder and first secretary of the Dublin Philosophical Society, had been engaged to contribute a description of Ireland to an ambitious, even grandiose, work entitled The English Atlas which the London bookseller and publisher Moses Pitt had been planning since 1678.2 The Atlas came to a halt after four volumes (covering northern Europe), of a projected eleven, had appeared; Pitt had run into financial difficulties and been declared bankrupt in 1683; he took refuge in Ireland for a time but was eventually arrested in April 1685 and imprisoned for debt. Molyneux, meanwhile, had set about gathering materials for the Description which he planned to write, but, in disgust at Pitt's arrest, he later burnt all that he himself had written. Fortunately, however, he preserved the work of the other contributors.
