The Ordnance Survey of Ireland has produced a remarkable digital archive of maps dating back to 1837, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
It's all in the maps - every historic site, every church, every school, every gravel pit, every road, every spring, every parish pump and everything else of note.
From the time they started out way back in 1837, the map-makers of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland (OSI) didn't miss a thing.
The old six-inch maps (that's six inches to the mile) were etched in reverse onto copper plate, printed in "grayscale" and then hand-coloured to highlight different features.
And now they have all been seamlessly joined together by digital technology in a project of international significance.
This evening, President Mary McAleese will officially open a major exhibition in Dublin Castle that will give members of the public their first glimpse of this remarkable digital archive. Entitled Dublin City and its Villages: 1837-1840, it includes not just maps, but also illustrations and text on the history of each area.
Residents of Blanchardstown, for example, will be fascinated to discover just how small it was in the years before the Great Famine. Though the village barely had a few dozen houses, it had a police station, a courthouse, an "RC chapel", a national school and a smithy - all identified on the OSI six-inch map.
A later map of the Broadstone area, dating from the 1860s, shows the Royal Canal carried on an aqueduct over Phibsborough Road to the terminus of the Midland Great Western Railway; it is so meticulously detailed that even what's in people's back gardens - whether vegetable plots or formal shrubbery - is illustrated.
The exhibition, in the Erne Room of the State Apartments, has the north side of Dublin on one wall and the south side on another. The OSI sees it as "a walk through the past, which will hopefully bring back memories". There will also be a competition for children to pick out certain things on the maps and identify them.
An 1890 map of Galway, not included in this exhibition, shows a tramway running from the railway station to Salthill, via Eyre Square, Shop Street and Dominick Street.
Eyre Square, incidentally, was laid out very simply at the time, with 23 trees around its perimeter and nothing but grass in the middle of its sloping site.
Malachy McVeigh, the OSI senior operations manager in charge of the project, sees a very practical use for the new digital archive. "Anyone buying a site can now trace its history from 1837 to the present day and find out whether it was prone to flooding, if there was an old quarry there or how close is the nearest well".
According to Mr McVeigh, this is the first digital archive of its kind anywhere in Europe and it has attracted "worldwide interest". It is to be launched in Australia next February and at a US genealogical congress in Boston in August. All of the information in the massive seven-terrabyte archive will also be available via the internet.
Mr McVeigh, who is from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, believes it will prove invaluable to genealogical researchers. "Say you live in Australia, and you're third-generation Irish, from next year you'll be able go into a college or university there, call up a map of where your grandparents came from, see it and get a printout of it".
The task of assembling it has taken three years, with Maurice Kavanagh as team leader. Among his assistants are three recent geography graduates of NUI Maynooth - Michelle Jordan, from Lucan, Co Dublin; Annette Myers, from Farranfore, Co Kerry, and Aisling O'Sullivan, from Cappoquin, Co Waterford.
"There's so much work to do", Ms Jordan says. "The six-inch series is already seamless and we're now working on the much larger 25-inch maps. When it's all done, people will be able to click on a symbol and call up a table of information from the Census, the National Archives and other sources".
This may not be as simple as it sounds. As in Brian Friel's Translations, names changed as places were mapped. Anyone consulting the archive would need to know the old name of a townland; Allihies, on the Beara Peninsula , for example, appears as "Allaghee More" or "Allagheee Beg".
The aim of the project was to capture all versions of OSI mapping from 1837 to 1913. With the six-inch series now completed, further work should see the 25-inch series - mainly of cities and towns - finished by the end of this year and other map series all digitised by the end of 2006.
According to Malachy McVeigh, the OSI's decision to "go back and look at our history" was made because its modern mapping is largely finished. The most recent 1:1,000 maps of Dublin, for example, are just a year old and updated every year with the aid of aerial photography, our version of the US military's satellite imaging.
The exhibition runs until July 29th. Admission is free.