Maggie O’Farrell

But of course, you fast forward, say, a thousand years or so, and you get to the Roman Empire.

Yes.

So the Ordnance Survey was an organisation, a British organisation.

And at this point, of course, the 19th century Ireland was a colony of Britain.

And the British decided that they needed to map Ireland in the 1820s.

And it was for taxation purposes.

It was for what's called a cess tax.

There's still even now in Ireland an expression which means to sort of say get lost or curses on you.

And it's bad cess to you.

And that's where it comes from.

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.