Maggie O’Farrell

It was only then that I thought, OK, I think actually this is going to happen.

Because up until that point I kept thinking, it's so likely that it won't happen, the film won't happen.

But I was only on that day really when I was on set where I thought, okay, I think this is happening now.

So I think all families have their myths.

And in my family, we were often told as children that...

We had an ancestor who'd worked on the first ever maps of Ireland he'd drawn.

And the myth sounds a little bit like he'd been a one-man band and drawn the whole map of Ireland himself.

And it was just a story that I was very used to.

And I've always wanted to know a little bit more about that.

So I went looking for him to see if I could find out if this was true and to what extent it was true.

and it turns out that there is truth in it, and of course, like everything else, the truth is much more complicated, so I did discover that my great-great-grandfather, Tomás, worked for the second revisions of the map of Ireland for the Ordnance Survey, and this happened in about the 1852 to 1856, something like that, and

As I was looking at those dates, I was thinking that's, in the kind of broad spectrum of Irish history, that's a very fraught time to be working on maps of Ireland.

Because, as you know, of course, the Great Famine began in about 1846 to about 1852.

And I thought that's a very strange time to be surveying and mapping a country.

And what must that have been like?

What could that possibly have been like for somebody who lived through it?

But he wasn't easy to find because if you were Irish and you worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, you were not allowed to sign your own work.

It had to be signed by a British army officer.

So he himself was quite difficult to pinpoint.

I did manage it after a lot of researching through archives in Dublin.