Every age of Irish history painted the island differently. We'll show you the map of who held the land — you tell us when. Ten rounds. No peeking at the atlas.
The quiz is winnable, and not by knowing dates. Every age leaves a shape on the map, and once you know what to look at you can place a picture within a century or two without recognising a single kingdom on it.
Before you look at anything else, count how many powers are on the map. That one number puts you within a few centuries almost every time.
Sixteen tiny territories and no big blocks is Ptolemy's Ireland, around 100 to 400. A handful of large ones, five at first and creeping up to nine, is the age of the fifths, roughly 400 to 900: whole provinces, one colour each, splintering slowly. Eleven or twelve is the two centuries either side of 1100, when the over-kingdoms were breaking into smaller kingdoms. Eighteen, the most fragmented the island ever looks, is the 14th and 15th centuries, after the colony had shrunk and before the Tudors arrived.
Then it collapses. Two colours means the 17th century or the 20th. One colour means somewhere between 1653 and 1921.
After 1169 the story of the map is a single block that grows and shrinks around Dublin and the south-east, and its size dates the picture.
Thirteen counties in one colour is the first Norman push. Seventeen is the high tide of the colony, around 1250 to 1330, the furthest it ever reached. Five is the Pale at its worst, in the 1400s, when English Ireland had shrunk to a strip you could ride across in a day. Twenty-two is the Tudor conquest nearly finished, with only a few holdouts left. Twenty-four with eight plantation counties beside it is Ulster after 1608.
Some ages genuinely look identical, and it is worth knowing which so you do not think you are missing something.
From 1653 to 1921 the whole island is one colour. The Act of Union, the Famine and the Land War draw exactly the same map, because the thing the map records, who holds the ground, did not change. Everything that mattered in those years happened underneath a picture that never moved. From 1922 the map is twenty-six counties and six, and it has stayed that way through four ages since.
The quiz will not ask you to choose between two identical maps. It checks what is actually drawn before it picks the wrong answers.
The borders are modern county lines, used in every age including the ones long before counties existed, so you can always find the place you know. Before 1600 they are an approximation of who was dominant, not a survey, and before 1169 they are a lookup grid rather than a frontier.
So the quiz is a test of reading this map, which is not quite the same as a test of Irish history. A medieval king would not recognise the shapes, only the colours.
Then go and look at the real thing: the atlas lets you drag the same map through ten thousand years, and every age has its own page with the story behind the colours.