Masters of all they survey

An ordnance survey of Ireland from Derry to Kerry in the 19th century unearthed many mysteries of ancient legend and lore, writes…

An ordnance survey of Ireland from Derry to Kerry in the 19th century unearthed many mysteries of ancient legend and lore, writes Eileen Battersby.

If the 19th century was a time of revolution, war, poverty and injustice - in short, much as has been any period of history before or since - it was also an era of exploration and discovery. Not all of this excitement was confined to distant, exotic places. Despite the absence of social upheaval created by industrialisation, Ireland was to experience a most radical cultural revolution as well as cultural rescue operation through the impact and resulting legacy of the Ordnance Survey.

Initially demanded of the British government by Irish landowners anxious for a national survey and land valuation to redress taxation, the survey's methodology far exceeded measurement and mapping. Maps are where adventure meets history, geography and fact. But linguistics, antiquities, history and folklore each played important roles in the complex, and often contentious story as a team of remarkable Irish scholars, such as the great George Petrie and John O'Donovan, worked in the field along with trained military engineers and surveyors as well as ordinary citizens who were called upon to unravel the mysteries of local legend and lore.

The survey, begun with Co Derry and completed with Co Kerry, was a practical cultural revolution, predating the Gaelic Revival by more than half a century. Between the years 1824 and 1846, the time it took to produce the 1,900 six-inch maps which were the central objective of the survey, semi-literate peasants were quizzed about tales and place names they had known, or half-known, all their lives. Suddenly a half-remembered myth was, often infuriatingly, important, particularly if there was more than one version.

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This intriguing, multi-dimensional story with its cast of strong personalities headed by Petrie, the English administrator, and Captain Thomas Larcom, later supervisor of the 1841 census, has already been well told by John Andrews, the pioneering English historical geographer and former professor of Geography at Trinity College Dublin, in his classic study, A paper landscape: the Ordnance Survey in nineteenth-century Ireland (Oxford, 1975; reissued Four Courts Press, Dublin 2001). Now historian Gillian Doherty, of University College Cork, brings the account a vital stage further in what could be seen as a complementary companion volume of sorts, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory.

By focusing on one very important aspect of the project, Larcom's innovative plan to publish a series of county memoirs, an ambition that was never achieved, she explores the fascinating mass of information gathered for these memoirs. Throughout this book, she quotes wonderful insights recorded by the often bewildered, at times, irritated scholars who nevertheless, as William Stokes, Petrie's biographer, argued, were aware, an Irish tradition is a vocal history. It was also one with its own specific problems.

"Of all the themes treated by Ordnance Survey staff," writes Doherty, "folklore was the most provocative and divisive. Staff disagreed about the reliability of oral tradition as a historical source and about the honesty of witnesses. Many memoir-writers believed that folklore was intellectually unsound, morally reprehensible and socially unacceptable. They ridiculed legendary stories as irrational fabrications that were invented 'in latter times to amuse the ignorant', and criticised the 'weak imaginations' of those who told them." The local people, complained memoir staff, "often confused myth with history". Yet these very tales, be they innocent or deliberate distortion, were valuable. As were accounts in which it seemed the fairies, angered by human interference with a particular tree or stone, made harsh, often terrifying, responses, usually in the form of instant death for the perpetrator. These often-colourful stories were entertaining, if much of the fun was lost on exasperated staff searching for sustainable historical fact.

POSSIBLY MORE IMPORTANT, as far as the survey was concerned, was the useful role the local resident played in the charting of Ireland's antiquities. "There was," writes Doherty, "general ignorance about Ireland's ancient topography in the early 19th century. Ireland's physical remains had never been systemically studied and many historical sites were unknown outside their immediate localities. A civilian memoir-writer commented that remarkable monuments had gone unnoticed and their history remained obscure." Yet Ireland's antiquities already had a champion in the person of artist, musicologist and antiquarian Petrie, who had brought to the survey his already established reputation as a polymath of immense learning, energy and artistic ability, if scant organisational skill. He had accumulated a major private collection of antiquities and artefacts. The son of a portrait painter, Petrie deferred to landscape painting as a young man.

Within that landscape was something which would become vital to him: evidence of Ireland's archaeological past. Aware of the disappearance, within his own lifetime, of many of the monuments he had painted, Petrie knew the value of records and surveys. "If I had not sketched so much then years since - very little would be known hereafter of the antiquities. And this shows the necessity of having a draughtsman with the topographer." Two such draughtsmen, were George Du Noyer and William Wakeman, former students of Petrie at the drawing school of the Royal Irish Society. Wakeman proves a lively observer in colourful entries that are quoted at length.

The present is rarely all that new. It has usually been reflected in the past. Now with Ireland's natural and built heritage constantly at the mercy of motorways and yet another golf course, there is some irony to be had from noting the concern of Petrie and his colleagues, as farmers frequently dismantled monuments in order to use the stones for building houses, field walls and boundaries.

Development is not a recent threat. When visiting Co Sligo in 1837 on Ordnance Survey work, Petrie was shocked to discover that Carrowmore cemetery, the largest assembly of prehistoric monuments of its kind in the world, had been ravaged. Only 60 of the 200 stone circles recorded by him on a previous visit in 1820, some 17 years earlier, then remained. "Cairns, cromlechs and stone circles," writes Doherty, "were being knocked down even as he wrote." Reporting back to Larcom, Petrie felt that the farmers had "no reluctance to destroy them - on the contrary, are glad to get permission to clear the land of them". The responsibility for such destruction lay firmly, according to Petrie, with the landowners. Many landlords proved themselves indifferent to the plight of a heritage that meant nothing to them.

"Larcom and Petrie instructed memoir staff to draw and describe artefacts, to record the circumstances and places of discovery, and to buy them wherever possible." Doherty makes it clear that the Board of the Ordnance never sanctioned, and was never informed of these purchases. It would be interesting to discover exactly how extensive this buying practice became. Probably through Petrie's connection as a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the survey staff worked closely with the academy.

IT IS ALSO, most definitely, a story in which two distinct traditions, and two languages, compete. Although the Irish language had been desperately undermined, Doherty notes that "in spite of the blows dealt to Irish learning since the reign of Henry VIII, however, Gaelic culture survived in the 19th century as a post-aristocratic and non-hegemonic one. It was, in effect, a counter culture, distinct from, and often opposed to the dominant literary culture. It survived because people preserved the relics, customs, oral and written evidences of the past, and the knowledge of former positions."

Tracing the origins of place names, often lost when an English translation was applied to an Irish name, presented a complex and scholarly challenge for the survey. This was the area in which Irish language scholars such as John O'Donovan, often a waspish commentator as evident through the Letters of the Ordnance Survey - an ongoing series published by Four Masters Press - and Eugene O'Curry dominated through their awareness of the cultural dispossession mentality.

In a letter written to Larcom, O'Donovan outlined the damage done to the Irish language by generations of English soldiers, administrators and planters. It was not only place names that had been affected, O'Donovan discovered, but the surnames of the Irish themselves. "People frequently took great licence when changing names," writes Doherty, "a matter that caused problems for genealogical research." Just as two German scholars, the Brothers Grimm, explored on foot the wealth of their country's folklore in the pursuit of regional dialect and linguistic variations, so too did a remarkable multidisciplinary team of Irish scholars combine in an enduring project that mapped the landscape and so much else in initiating what would be a national identity.

The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory by Gillian M. Doherty is published by Four Courts Press, €45.