Poor W. F. Wakeman was the unsung artistic hero of the John O'Donovan Ordnance Survey letters of 1839. O'Donovan was, of course, one of the giants of the 19th century, and his importance may be measured as much in what he did as in the effect he had on people's minds.
He enabled people to see that Ireland was not just a defeated country populated by ineffectual peasants, but it was a lansdcape teeming with archaeological ruins and with a rich and widespread lore, both in English and Irish.
Trailing after him in Kilkenny, was the artist Wakeman, whose job was to make sketches and fine-line drawings of the antiquities which O'Donovan was finding in his endless peregrinations. It's impossible at this point in our history, with half a hundred guide books to choose from, to imagine how enormously difficult O'Donovan's task was. He had no gazetteer to steer him to the abandoned keep, the old well, the ruined motte and bailey. Nor did he have proper maps or decent roads to travel over. He discovered whatever existed simply by asking locals, in either Irish or English, and then making his way to each object, there to measure and make a written account of it.
Somewhere in his wake, was poor Wakeman. "Wakeman has not joined us, and I cannot imagine what he is doing," wrote O'Donovan testily to the Ordnance Survey head office in Dublin from Kilkenny in September 1839. "I fear we shall have this county finished before his arrival. This irregularity will never do ... He must necessarily work separately from us or leave the most curious remains untouched. Could you not spare another Draftsman?" And Wakeman never did catch up with O'Donovan, but instead remained toiling in solitude during the wet and wild autumn of that year. And bad enough though it is to work in the open taking notes in bad weather, doing faithful line-drawings in the rain, must have been next to impossible. But poor Wakeman, wandering alone on foot round the county, persevered loyally with his drawings in the downpours. And he was only 17.
You can get some measure of the potential of this fine artist from the recent publication of Ordnance Survey Letters, Kilkenny by Fourmasters Press, Dublin, which is now in fourth year of publishing the entire O'Donovan opus. At €60 the Kilkenny volume isn't cheap, but considering the position it holds in the history of Irish national identity, it certainly isn't expensive.
For these are the Dead Sea Scrolls of the scriptures of Irish identity: and important though they would anyway have been, the date of their composition makes them absolutely vital. O'Donovan, and his fellow interrogators of local people about place-names and local lore, were working just before the Famine. They took the vibrant snapshots of popular memory just moments before the cataclysm which was to sweep through the Irish popular imagination. From these illustrations of a world about to vanish derives the entire body of topographical literature which is so central to our knowledge of what this country is.
The driving force behind the project to publish all 29 sets of O'Donovan's Ordnance Survey county letters is Enda Cunningham of Cathach Books in Duke Street, Dublin. He has already published the letters in separate volumes on Dublin, Donegal, Meath and Kildare, though with precious little publicity to date, and an even thriftier measure of gratitude. But these works are cultural foundation stones: upon them rests much of the edifice of geographical and psychological self-awareness of this country - and moreover, they represent the fruits of unspeakably large labours of love and duty.
O'Donovan - and others, including the O'Curry brothers - walked thousands of miles around Ireland, talking to local people, finding out the names of townlands, hillsides and meadows. They recorded their discoveries in almost daily letters to the Ordnance Survey superintendent Thomas Larcom, in which they described the raths, abbeys, priories, ogham stones and whatever lapidary bric-a-brac and local legends they came across.
These hand-written letters were never published - but they were typed up about 80 years ago, with three carbon copies per page: another labour love which echoed the heroic endeavours of O'Donovan 80 years before. Enda Cunningham managed to obtain one complete set of these carbons, as well as the name-books on which the young O'Donovan had managed to write down the name of every single part of Ireland: the name-books for Cork reach to some 20 volumes.
O'Donovan's letters were enchantingly witty and erudite essays around the antiquities of Ireland. Yet though they represent the chronicles of perhaps the most arduous personal journeying around this country ever undertaken, they are almost completely free of any sense of travail. O'Donovan must have been a gregarious, affable, energetic, enquiring fellow, but sceptical withal. He clearly loved his work.
Kilkenny was, perhaps more than most, a particular labour of love for O'Donovan, because he was a native of the county. And perhaps more than in any other county, Kilkenny people have an especial love of the manmade legacies which so enrich their landscape, and traditionally have enjoyed a more inclusive sense of self: they know that Normans, Welsh, English and Flemish as well as Gaels wrote their signatures across the terrain in letters of stone.
O'Donovan's Ordnance Letters for Kilkenny, illustrations by Wakeman, edited by Michael Herity, and with contributions from him, Diarmuid O Cathain and Ferghus O Fearghail, are now published for the first time ever. They constitute the most captivating, wonderful book to have been published in Ireland this year.