Maggie O’Farrell

So initially it was taxation purposes and they had an edict that no Irish were to be employed, which didn't go very well.

They initially thought that they could map the whole of Ireland in seven years.

It actually took them almost 20 and they did have to employ Irish because obviously...

you know, they would come across linguistic problems.

So there was a mountain on one side, people called it one thing, on the other side, they called it another.

Not to mention the fact that obviously, when a British army division arrived in a township, the Irish were naturally quite alarmed and suspicious.

And I have heard accounts that when the British would spend a long time setting up their trig point, which of course was essential for the accurate mathematic calculations of distances,

and during the night the Irish would just move it a few feet just to mess with them.

So they did end up having to employ Irish, one of which was my great-great-grandfather.

When I realised that he'd started in the late 1840s, it really stopped me in my track because, of course, anyone who knows anything about Irish history realises that those were the final years of the Great Famine.

So obviously the human and physical geography of the land was completely changed in just that short decade.

It is a necessary but unenviable part of his current task to distill into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here since the first maps were drawn.

These new revisions must contain a cartographic record of the Great Hunger, the disaster that struck this land more than a decade ago now.

Tomás must amend the hundreds of households in a barony to the handful that now remain.

He must erase row after row of tenant cottages on landowner estates which have been emptied and dismantled.

The Redcoats turn their eyes from this task.

They prefer never to acknowledge the crisis that befell the country, the losses and deprivations it has suffered.

They do not wish to make such marks upon their maps, which might lead to certain admittances.

Tomas has determined, however, that his maps will bear an account of what happened, what was lost, if it kills him.

Well, the Great Famine had very complicated and numerous causes.