Map of a Nation (50 page)

 

U
NTIL THE COMMENCEMENT
of the Irish Ordnance Survey, it was said that Thomas Colby was shy of publication. A ‘morbid apprehension of criticism’ has been blamed for his failure to provide the public with an account of the Trigonometrical Survey’s progress after he had taken over its field work. Mudge and Colby’s third volume of the
Account of the Trigonometrical
Survey of England and Wales
had appeared in 1811, and then … silence. Colby appears not to have subsequently challenged the recommendation of the Commission of Military Enquiry that the
Account
be discontinued, nor to have carried on publishing reports in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society
. ‘It is impossible not to regret this fatal error,’ one of Colby’s colleagues lamented rather melodramatically, as ‘it has materially tended to alienate the Ordnance Survey from the good feelings of the scientific public, and has thrown over a work, with which not merely every scientific, but also every practical man, should be familiar, an air of official mystery and seclusion.’

In Ireland, Colby seems to have revised his opinion about publication. Along with Larcom, he devised a tantalising scheme: the composition of ‘memoirs’ to accompany the Ordnance Survey’s Irish map, which would flesh out its ‘paper landscape’ into what has been called a ‘fully rounded national survey’ of its historical and contemporary appearance. In his annual report of 1826, Colby set out his intention that ‘a great variety of materials towards the
formation
of statistical and other reports will be collected’. He commanded his map-makers to carry ‘remark books’ at all times while surveying Ireland, and dictated that these journals should be filled with ‘a great deal of information respecting the means of conveyance, state of agriculture and manufacture, and in short of almost everything that relates to the resources of the country’. Colby was in charge of overseeing the Trigonometrical Survey in Ireland, and it was ultimately to his assistant Thomas Aiskew Larcom that the task of bringing to life the ‘memoir project’ would fall.

Colby and Larcom’s enterprise was not especially unusual. A number of map-makers had marketed memoirs of their cartographic tribulations in the past, mostly to boost sales and attract interest in the finished surveys. In 1809, for example, the cartographer and map-publisher Aaron Arrowsmith the elder had published a
Memoir Relative to the Construction of the Map of Scotland
…
in the Year 1807
, which not only contained one of the earliest uses of the name ‘Ordnance Survey’ but also described the map-maker’s joy at discovering the Military Survey of Scotland stored away in a library in boxes, when he was researching materials for a new map. But the sheer scope of Colby and Larcom’s proposal for the memoirs of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland was exceptional.

Larcom intended that, rather than providing an account of the Ordnance Survey’s own techniques and experiences, the memoirs should tell the story of the land itself. He hoped that every parish in Ireland would eventually possess its own memoir, which would describe each area’s natural and human history, ancient and modern ‘artificial state’, and ‘social economy and productive economy’. He issued his map-makers with hints about the type of questions they might ask the local populace when conducting their researches. They should enquire after ‘food; fuel; dress; longevity; usual number in a family; early marriages’, Larcom instructed. Are there ‘any remarkable instances on
either of these heads? What are their amusements and recreations? Patrons and patrons’ days; and traditions respecting them? What local customs
prevail
?’ How about ‘Peculiar games?’ he wondered. ‘Any legendary tales of poems recited around the fireside? Any ancient music, as clan marches or funeral cries? They differ in different districts, collect them if you can,’ he added eagerly. And what about ‘any peculiarity of costume? Nothing more indicates civilisation and intercourse. Emigration. Does emigration prevail?’ If so, ‘to what extent? And at what season? To what places? Do any return? What number go annually to get harvest or other work in England or other parts of the kingdom? Do they take wives and families with them? Do they rent ground, and sow potatoes for their winter support?’ Larcom’s motivation appears to have been intellectual rather than commercial: to map Ireland’s human face as well as its topographical shape. And there was clearly popular interest in such a project. In County Down, a local clergyman accosted one of the map-makers to ask ‘would we publish any book to illustrate the map … “If so,” says he, “A [
sic
] shall be
locally
interested, and do all in my power to
contribute
towards its completion.”’

Larcom and Colby’s memoir project was arguably the epitome of all the digressions in which the Ordnance Survey had dabbled since its foundation. Its superintendents (Edward Williams only excepted) had all been
ambitious
perfectionists, whose intentions to create an utterly truthful image of the British Isles led them repeatedly into a number of distractions from the central task of map-making, such as the measurement of the meridian arc through England, and the Shetlands venture. Even Colby’s decisions to map Ireland and Scotland were diversions from the completion of the First Series of Ordnance Survey maps, which ostensibly formed the project’s principal focus. Although one cannot help but contemplate these side projects with awed admiration, it is also true that they slowed down the production of complete maps of England and Wales by decades, and increased the Ordnance Survey’s expenditure by eyewatering amounts. As we shall see, this would cause significant problems for Colby.

 

B
Y
1830 T
HOMAS
A
ISKEW
L
ARCOM
had been moved from Ireland’s ‘great outdoors’ to the comfort of the Ordnance Survey’s
head-quarters
at Mountjoy House, in Phoenix Park, about two miles north-west of central Dublin. He began transforming the building into an efficient
map-making
factory, successfully juggling the Trigonometrical Survey’s measurements with the influx of the Interior Surveyors’ plans and the needs of the engravers. He also came up with alternative printing methods,
including
electrotyping (a way of making faithful duplicate printing plates) to speed up the charts’ publication, and he opened Mountjoy House to all who might benefit from the Ordnance Survey’s data. Larcom voiced the unnervingly dispassionate ambition to create ‘men who work like machines, without thinking or adapting’, and by 1836 he was proud to report that Mountjoy was working with ‘steam engine rapidity’.

Chief among Larcom’s objects of interest in Ireland was its toponymy. Thorough research into its place names was the principal reason for his having sought lessons in Irish in 1828. He also felt that the undeniable
necessity
of such toponymic research for map-making justified the fecund nature of the memoir project to anyone who might otherwise question its utility. He was adamant that, in order ‘to make the Maps a standard of Orthography as well as of Topography’, a deep excavation of Ireland’s history, culture and language was essential. And ‘to trace all the mutations of each name, would be, in fact, to pass in review the local history of the whole country’, he explained.

In the first year of the Ordnance Survey’s residence in Ireland, Colby had issued a series of ‘Instructions for the Interior Survey’ regarding research into place names. In this document, he set out his preferred method of
settling
on toponymy for the map, which reiterated the principles behind the Interior Survey’s researches in Wales: that the map-makers should initially discover place names by asking locals and then verify them with reference to printed and manuscript texts and native-language speakers. His mind set on perfection as always, Colby instructed that ‘the name of each place is to be inserted as it is commonly spelt, in the first column of the name book: and the various modes of spelling it used in books, writing &c. are to be inserted in the second column, with the authority placed in the third
column opposite to each.’ However, when the Interior Surveyors’ name books began arriving back at the Ordnance Survey’s headquarters in Phoenix Park, Colby and Larcom realised the extent of the task they faced. Larcom had hoped that a few lessons in Irish would allow him to reconcile the varying forms of the current and historical place names himself, and come up with a viable standard form for the map. But once he saw just how many variants existed and how wildly they differed, he was forced to admit that his Irish skills were not up to the job and that this crucial aspect of map-making required its own discrete branch.

Any attempt to standardise Ireland’s place names depended on the
cooperation
of native Irish-speaking linguists. But here Larcom came up against one of the founding principles of the Irish Ordnance Survey: that Ireland’s citizens were to be totally excluded from participation. However, the Trigonometrical Survey had already cracked in this respect. The British Sappers had resisted Colby’s efforts at moral and intellectual self-
improvement
, and their widespread drunken illiteracy had begun to get on officers’ nerves. In April 1825, the employment of Irish ‘country labourers’ at 1s per day had been authorised on the humblest aspects of the Ordnance Survey, such as laying out the measuring chains. Before long, there were fifty-three Irish labourers employed on the Survey to eighty-seven British Sappers. These numbers rose sharply over the next year, and by 1826 the number of Irishmen easily matched the number of Britons. By the late 1830s, when 2139 Ordnance Surveyors were crawling over the face of Ireland, the number of Irish employees outnumbered the British Sappers by four to one. It is ironic that this institution, whose founders had initially been so derogatory about Irish workers, were forced to turn to them for obedient, skilled personnel when their own British personnel fell short of the mark.

Because of this growing acceptance of Irish participation in the Ordnance Survey, Larcom felt justified in overturning the original decree. So in 1829, he established a branch almost entirely composed of Irish-speakers to research the nation’s place names. The so-called Topographical Branch was initially headed by the Dublin-born creator of the first dictionary of the Irish language, Edward O’Reilly, but his health was poor, and in August 1829 he died. Larcom promptly received an enthusiastic letter from his old tutor,
John O’Donovan. Now twenty-four and with an eye to the main chance, O’Donovan proposed that he be given a job on the Topographical Branch. He recorded that Larcom replied ‘immediately, offering me a situation at a very small stipend, of which I accepted after some hesitation’.

The Topographical Branch soon became a vibrant centre for toponymic research. After O’Reilly’s death, a charming, suave and sociable antiquarian and artist called George Petrie was appointed its director, and he even donated his own home, a large town-house on Dublin’s Great Charles Street, as a headquarters for its work. Some of Ireland’s most accomplished linguists were recruited for the Topographical Branch: the scholar Eugene O’Curry (Eoghan Ó Comhraidhe), the archaeologist and historian William Wakeman, an
assistant
called Patrick O’Keeffe and the eccentric translator and poet James Clarence Mangan, ‘besides two or three more’. The Branch’s employees gave this office the affectionate nickname ‘Teepetrie’ (
tigh
, pronounced ‘tee’,
signifies
house), and it is nice to imagine them huddling under its roof, as intent on surveying Ireland’s place names as the Interior and Trigonometrical Surveyors were on mapping its landscape from their canvas tents.

At first the Topographical Branch followed a system whereby the linguists stayed in Dublin and sent enquiries about place names to the officers of the Interior Survey to pursue ‘in the field’. But many map-makers lacked the skills or inclination to investigate the often complex questions of the Topographical Branch; Larcom thunderingly berated one officer for his ‘strange admission that you can give “no positive information” as to the name of a place surveyed by you! Who is to be looked to but you?’ he demanded. ‘You might with as much propriety say you can give no positive information as to its area. You are responsible for all that appears on your plan and for making it as perfect as “the scale admits”.’ The Topographical Branch soon adopted a new routine whereby John O’Donovan went out into the country to follow up the map-makers’ preliminary queries about place names with face-to-face conversations with local residents. In name books stuffed with notes, and daily (often twice-daily) letters, this maverick linguist sent his discoveries back to Larcom and to his colleagues in Teepetrie. The linguists then set to, consulting a plethora of printed and manuscript sources to find written authority for historical occurrences of the place names that
were being used across mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. ‘All sorts of old documents were examined, old spellings of names compared and
considered
,’ William Wakeman recalled.