Maggie O’Farrell

And those maps...

among the many, many effects of the Great Hunger, the maps were obsolete because, as you say, the human and physical geography of Ireland was completely reconfigured.

And so it was very important to almost straightaway to make revisions to it.

And so I realised that my great-great-grandfather began his employment with the OS in the later years of the famine, and that just stopped me in my tracks.

I couldn't understand...

What that task must have been like, you know, to be setting down those villages that had been erased, the million people who died, between a million and two million people who'd been forced to emigrate.

I mean, just, you know, cartographically to make a record of that must have been a very, very difficult task.

Yes.

I mean, you know, obviously mapping is a very, very complicated task.

I mean, it's, you know, part algebra, it's part mathematics, it's part linguistics, it's part history and folklore.

And in Ireland, I think it was particularly complicated for, you know, political colonialist reasons.

And I, you know, it was a question in my mind is what must it have been like to be an Irishman working on that project?

And I think in a sense, I came to the conclusion that

In a way, it was very, very good that Irishmen did work on it because otherwise so much would have been lost.

You know, so much of the linguistic and folkloric and historical roots of names would have been lost if they hadn't.

And there was a toponomy branch that had been set up in Dublin before.

by a man called John O'Donovan, and he was an Irish language scholar and he insisted on absolute rigour in place names and meanings and their connection to the land and these towns and settlements past.

I never knew that.

Yes, absolutely.

But you can still find those traces, you know, any place name that has the word Tuba in it, you know that there is a sacred well somewhere in that settlement.