Bodley Survey

Following the Flight of the Earls, this was land which had been set aside for the Ulster Plantation to be granted to a mixture of English and Scottish settlers and Irish inhabitants.

He had previously overseen a preliminary report of the Ulster terrain, but this was insufficient for the more formal requirements of the Plantation.

Areas were often defined by natural features such as hills or rivers or man-made constructions such as tower houses or burial mounds.

Some of the errors in the study led to land ownership disputes, and Bodley himself carried out later surveys to clarify the confusion.

The survey was part of an increasing effort to use scientific methods to measure terrain in the seventeenth century.