A book examining the history of a vast map-making project in Ireland that began in the 1820s has been re-issued. Eileen Battersby charts the cartographer's craft.
It could be seen as a clash of languages, of cultures, of tradition and, most especially, of methodology. The arrival of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the early 19th century was exciting, complex and not without many disputes and tantrums.
This is all thoroughly documented by John Andrews in A Paper Landscape, which was first published by the Oxford University Press in 1975 and has now been re-issued by Dublin publisher, Four Courts Press. The book examines the history and the personalities behind a massive undertaking that created a cartographic county-by-county legacy informing all aspects of administrating and understanding the island of Ireland.
A Paper Landscape is a seminal text, approaching the status of Frank Mitchell's Reading the Irish Landscape (1986, revised 1997). Exactly why the second edition of this classic by Andrews, a pioneering historical geographer, has taken so long to appear is bewildering, considering its quality, the strength of Irish historical geography studies and, of course, the book's popular standing as the source of Brian Friel's Translations (1980). Yet quibbles aside, it is now again available.
The survey, begun in Derry and completed in Kerry between 1824 and 1846 at the scale of six inches to a mile under the direction of the master-general and board of ordnance, was itself a post-Act of Union initiative implemented by the British government. It was executed by trained military engineers and surveyors, backed up by sappers and, as time went on, with increasing assistance from the natives, mainly local residents.
Those same 1,900 six-inch maps, as well as the various statistical surveys, name-books, details of place names, memoirs and correspondence associated with it, such as an ongoing series of the volumes of Ordnance Survey Letters, created a vast database of geographic material predating the computer by more than 150 years. It is an incredible and often misunderstood achievement that, as well as the formal general topographical mapping, included a geological survey. Antiquities, specifically monuments above ground, were recorded.
It is on the issue of place-names and the survey's impact on them that most misunderstanding occurs. Maj Thomas Colby, the officer who directed the Ordnance Survey in Britain, was put in charge of the Irish project. Colby, though by his nature happiest in the field, directed the survey from London. He had established a reputation as an expert in trigonometrical surveying, field astronomy and base measurement, and he saw himself as a man of science and a military man with little patience for civilians. Colby's man on the scene in Dublin, Thomas Larcom, is interesting - ultimately the scapegoat of the Irish Ordnance Survey, Larcom was to claim he had introduced the industrial revolution to map-making. He may well have.
As Andrews illustrates, Maj Colby was talented and had raised the question of Irish etymology early in the project, "only to decide against issuing any positive directives on the matter . . . he may also have been influenced by the belief that a majority verdict would lead him to a spelling that was 'correct' in some objective sense". However, "Irish place-names had been too variously mangled by generations of English-speaking settlers for any such assumptions to be valid."
Place-names are among the best documented features of the maps. Fact more than opinion mattered to Colby, who appears to have had a flair for survival, invariably eluding blame.
Linguistics and the vagaries of translation shape Friel's play. Yet Andrews indicates that a serious awareness of this problem was understood by Larcom, who had his difficulties with Colby and who had another tricky rival in Richard Griffith of the Irish general valuation office. While running the Ordnance Survey from the Phoenix Park headquarters, Larcom attempted to learn Irish and applied to the Irish Society for a teacher. An instructor, John O'Donovan, was appointed. For a time Larcom had three weekly lessons. The experience may not have left him fluent in Irish, but it did impress him sufficiently to employ an Irish scholar on the survey's staff.
Edward O'Reilly, the lexicographer, was the first toponymic field worker. Within six months he was dead. His successor, appointed in October 1830, was John O'Donovan.
Central to the Ordnance Survey Letters that act as a collective journal cum travelogue is O'Donovan, one of the most remarkable and versatile of 19th-century Irish scholars. But it was not scholarship that motivated the Ordnance Survey. Practical economics provided the reasons. The survey, established by the United Kingdom parliament and finally begun in 1824, was intended as a valuation of the land of Ireland. It was to ensure a greater equality in the local burden of taxation.
After much trial and error it became a most effective map-making body, but there was far more to it than even this. The Ordnance Survey was, and remains, a major element in Irish 19th-century cultural history. It is also, as Andrews points out, "the only survey of Ireland that has ever been brought to a conclusion". Officially referred to as "The Townland Survey of Ireland", the project gave the impression that the Irish knew little about maps and had less interest.
Although there was no Irish map-making tradition as such, the survey was pursued in something of the shadow of Gen Charles Vallancey's late 18th-century and unfinished military survey. Admittedly they were closer to military sketches than surveys and only mapped the south of Ireland.
PRIOR to this effort, John Speed and William Petty had also been busy. Petty's Down Survey (1685) would form the basis of most maps of Ireland until the the Ordnance Survey. Plantations had called for mapping, and civilian surveyors working in a private capacity had provided whatever maps were required by the public service. Small wonder that the surveyor was often called upon as if he were a lawyer. In Through Plantation Acres; an historical study of the Irish land surveyor and his maps by John Andrews (Belfast, 1985), one theme emerges: land and the Irish.
By the end of the 18th century, most counties could call on a county map, although most were unpublished. Andrews refers to Duncan's of Dublin as an example of a map used to supply grand juries. Interestingly, possibly the first step towards what would become a project on the scale of the Ordnance Survey was a government commission of 1809, appointed to examine the most significant peat bogs as a prelude to drainage and reclamation.
Cartography, or map-making, is an ancient art which has, over the centuries, evolved into a science. Such is the enduring beauty and romance of antique maps that their sale, and indeed theft, is one of the biggest stories in the art auction world. Huge prices and incredible stories surround single maps, often razored from the pages of a priceless atlas held in a famous library where security was not quite secure. Whether as treasure chart or legal document, as the text for a military campaign or a mountain ascent, they are books spread on the flat possessing a vocabulary that to some extent defies language, as well as offering a narrative all of their own. But the map above all is a landscape, the landscape. It captures the past and records change. Maps are where adventure meets history, geography and fact.
Islands have always fascinated map-makers and Ireland is no exception. Of course, the second-century cartographer Ptolemy of Alexandria must be credited with first mapping Ireland, but then he mapped the entire world as was then known to the Greeks and Romans. Centuries later came the great Gerard Mercator, born in Flanders in 1512, globe-maker, surveyor, map compiler, engraver and visionary, immortalised through his use of the word "atlas" and also through the rectangularmap projection.
Admirers of maps, students of history or lovers of beauty in general remain attracted to Irelande, Baptista Boazio's famous hand-coloured map of Ireland (1599, 1609). Working as the Earl of Essex's cartographic representative, Boazio was an artist. The unnamed source for his beautiful map that so brilliantly captures the drama of the Elizabethan age was a little-known English military engineer, Robert Lythe, who served in Ireland from 1567 to 1571.
Lythe's story, and also that of the other men who mapped this country, is told by Andrews in Shapes of Ireland - Maps and their Makers 1564-1839 (Dublin, 1997). It includes the early chapters of the mapping of Ireland, a story that was taken up by the Ordnance Survey.
A Paper Landscape by John Andrews is re-issued by Four Courts Press at €24.95
BY any man's measure, John O'Donovan (1809-61), tenacious scholar, custodian of Irish heritage and translator of Annals of the Four Masters, is the least likely member of a major British military operation. But he was a vital player in the Ordnance Survey, travelling the length and breadth of Ireland and visiting some 62,000 townlands in the process.
O'Donovan's quest for Irish-language place-names was both physically and intellectually demanding, and, as John Andrews writes, turned him into "a kind of one man local history department". His research brought him into contact with local people who often supplied the missing piece of information. He was a model employee, diligently reporting back most days to his boss in Dublin. These despatches, known as the Ordnance Survey Letters, filled 50 volumes when later edited by Father Michael O'Flanagan, and are the most famous body of writing connected with the project.
Bright and clever, capable of wit as well as pedantry, the mercurial O'Donovan, as playwright Brian Friel has conceded, is fascinating. Born in Attateemore, Co Kilkenny, O'Donovan's Catholic farming family was sufficiently comfortable that education was no difficulty.
The young O'Donovan soon acquired an interest in history. By 20 he was teaching the Irish language, and one of his students was none other than Larcom of the Ordnance Survey. O'Donovan, thanks to having tutored Larcom, was given a job by the survey. His brief was compiling place-names, of which he sourced some 140,000 on foot throughout Ireland. In 1840 he co-founded the Irish Archaeological Society with fellow scholar Eugene O'Curry (whose sister he married).
While O'Donovan's finest scholarly achievement must be the Annals published between 1848-51, he also produced a Grammar of the Irish Language (1845) as well as a supplement to Edward O'Reilly's Irish Dictionary. O'Donovan was called to the Bar in 1847 but never practised. When acting as Professor of Celtic Studies at the Queen's College, Belfast, he worked on a project to publish the ancient Brehon Laws but died at 50 and remains one of Ireland's most inspiring visionaries.
Eileen Battersby