Maggie O’Farrell

It actually, as humans, it predates our ability to write.

You know, the first known map in the world is an Iron Age map on the walls of a cave in what's now the Italian Alps in a place called Bedellina.

And somebody at some point was filled with the urge to draw, to scratch into the rock this exquisite rendering of their home, their fields and huts and their sort of town, I suppose you would call it.

And it's just such an interesting representation of the urge to say, this is who I am, this is where I am.

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.