Here we are looking at the Raven map of 1622 showing the villages of The Salters’ Company on the western shore of Lough Neagh. Unusually, this picture-map shows two villages: although it appears to be a conjoined image, one has to visually separate the village on the right (Salterstown) from the village on the left at Magherafelt.

The village at Salterstown, seen on the right, shows a bawn (fortified enclosure with house inside it) built of stone with some brick, and then running from its gateway, a dog-leg lane, on each side standing timber-framed houses. One could still see this in the landscape today: fragments of the bawn wall survive and the dog-leg in the laneway still survives in the modern farm lane.

On the right of the illustration, part of Lough Neagh is shown, and visitors today will see how much the Lough shore has fallen away from the edge of the village as the lake level has diminished.

Looking in focus at the village itself, clearly most of the houses are timber-framed: in other words, built of wood harvested from the medieval forests on the shore of the Lough. This village again was destroyed in 1641 during the Rebellion, and is now mostly farmland although it was in part re-settled. Archaeological excavations by an American crew in 1980, found traces of the timber-framed houses: one might have expected them to have been pre-fabricated as would be the norm in England but here the archaeological evidence suggests that these houses were in fact ‘earth-fast’: in other words, that the timbers were driven into the ground and the frame was raised above it.

Irish houses can also be seen - the smaller houses perhaps in the bottom-right built of earth and wattles with thatched roofs and small chimneys, and the names of the occupants are all listed. Interestingly, this site was used by The Salters’ Company in advance of the formal plantation: a glass-house for the manufacture of glass was built here in 1608 but it proved to be a commercial failure. There is still (even though the glass house vanished by 1614) a field in the neighbourhood known as ‘The Glass House Field’. It’s remarkable how long these memories last.

The village on the left (Magherafelt) is of course now occupied by the modern small town of Magherafelt and nothing of the plantation buildings survive although it is likely that the bawn, which one sees in an uncompleted state, stood at the summit of the small hill which crowns the town today, and the street shown in the illustration runs down as it still does today.

Both illustrations show timber-framed houses under construction.