The eruption of plots for reform in Ireland considered so far is seen by some as evidence of the birth of a new professional class, the colonial bureaucrat, “Protestant in religion, humanist in education and drawn from the younger houses of gentlemen.” But the host of plans, devices, and accounts are only a fraction of the outpourings presented to officials in London and Dublin, and by the second half of the sixteenth century some proposals began to assume another tone, one related to the increasing experience and familiarity of the commentators with Ireland itself. Indeed, Julia Reinhard Lupton has noted the variableness of the term plot in Elizabethan England, describing it as “a phrase encompassing English strategies for Irish reform, the cartographic projects of surveying and mapping that furthered them, and more generally a geographical, antiquarian approach to Irish history.” As the prospect of inhabiting and settling Irish lands increased following the confiscations in Laois and Offaly in the late 1550s, the attainder of Shane O’Neill in the late 1560s, and the massive forfeitures following the Desmond rebellions of the late 1570s, more and more of the plots of Ireland were concerned with the cartographic details of the land, details increasingly acknowledged as a necessary prelude to the civilized use of land. Consequently, a new set of words began to appear in the Irish State Papers, with proposals now headed by terms such as view, description, account, survey, and before long, words such as map, card(e), and plat would join the discourse concerning Ireland. All of these concepts are evidence that a new “map consciousness” or at the very least a willingness and “ability to think cartographically … was becoming evermore widespread,” which means that the effort to inscribe or to represent Ireland – the surveying and mapping of territory – can thus be read as an attempt to objectify knowledge and to gain control over the land and its use.