If Maps Could Speak

Richard Kirwan

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Book
€16.99

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Publication date: 2010

ISBN: 978-1-907535-09-3

Category: Memoir/History

Type: Paperback

Price: €16.99

If Maps Could Speak is an engaging combination of memoir, history and stories about people and places. Richard Kirwan, a former Director of Ordnance Survey Ireland, takes the reader behind the scenes into the minds and work of the early map-makers with accounts of their inventions, adventures, endurance and heroism in pre-Famine Ireland. Their struggles and achievements are counterpointed by the successful efforts of the author and the OS staff to bring the mapping of Ireland up to date with the help of photographic and computer technology in the final decades of the twentieth century.

This is also the story of a boy, brought up in Waterford, who loved the lines and boundaries on maps and got to know his city and its surrounds, its physical characteristics and its people in the company of a loving father and grandfather.

Although Richard Kirwan lost his father when still a young teenager he never lost his affection for the old maps and the people who created them – both map-makers like the first director of Ordnance Survey, the great Thomas Colby, whose achievements are felt throughout the book as a kind of inspiration, and the people of Ireland who gave the maps their placenames, their boundaries and their memories. Throughout If Maps Could Speak, the author writes honestly about his professional and personal struggles and in the final section, ‘The Two Cartographers’, provides a fascinating reflection on the differences between the old kind of map-making and the new, both of which served Ireland well.

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About the author

Richard Kirwan was born in Waterford in 1948 and graduated in civil engineering from University College Cork in 1970. He joined the Irish army Corps of Engineers and was posted to Ordnance Survey Ireland, undertaking postgraduate studies in mapping and surveying at the School of Military Engineering in Newbury, England. He left the army to take up the position of Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Survey in 1986. He was Director of the OS from 1996 until he retired in 2005. He lives near Waterford city.