One day while the author and cartographer, Tim Robinson, was peacefully at work at home in Roundstone, Co Galway, a "terrible racket" broke out and children ran by his window. He noticed it was a helicopter landing in a field nearby and returned "grumpily" to his studio.
A few minutes later, a tall figure in military apparel marched in and announced himself as "Commandant Prendergast".
The Ordnance Survey had been carrying out some triangulation work which involved flying from peak to peak around Connemara, and had decided to drop in. "We had planned to kidnap you and take you back to Dublin, but then we decided you were doing good work down here," the commandant said.
Last week, officer and gentleman met face to face again at a function in Kennys Gallery in Galway to mark Tim Robinson's retirement from cartography.
This time, the commandant was in a suit and introduced himself as "Mr" and as vice-president of the Irish Institution of Surveyors.
As both men noted, it marked the end of an era. Tim Robinson represents the last of a dying breed who produced maps manually in manuscript form with pen and ink. It is more than 12 years since the map-production lines of the Ordnance Survey were totally automated.
"He made surveying sexy again," notes Tom Kenny of Kennys. "The company run by him and his wife, Mairead, Folding Landscapes, has made an immense contribution to cartography - particularly the recording of place-names which might have been forgotten and which had already been anglicised."
"Nowadays," Tim Robinson says, "the computer does it all: the plane passes high overhead, the aerial photos are analysed by photogrammetry, the data are digitised and stored in a Geographical Informations System, from which maps at any scale can be generated and printed without having ever seen the light of day."
At the gathering in Kennys, he said: "This is not the occasion for reflections on the results . . . but I would hope that when all this still raw technology has been absorbed into skilled practice and tradition, the ethos of cartography will reassert itself."