Reactions to the Ordnance Survey: A Window on Prefamine Ireland

Abstract

Reactions to the Ordnance Survey: A Window on Prefamine Ireland Patrick S. McWilliams In 1824, the British government established the Ordnance Survey of Ireland to create new maps of the country, which would in turn serve to address inequalities in local taxation. The survey commenced in 1825 and was underway for nearly twenty years. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Colby (1784–1852) of the Royal Engineers, also director of the Survey of Great Britain, led the huge project. A small army of workers, under the direction of officers and men from the ranks of the Royal Sappers and Miners, traversed Ireland to create a series of maps at the very large scale of six inches to a mile. These maps delineated every nook and cranny of the country. A secondary scheme called the Memoir, the brainchild of Colby’s deputy in Ireland, Lieutenant Thomas Larcom (1801–79), aimed to supplement the maps, and to chart the productive worth of the country. This, too, sent numerous people, most of them civilians, into the field from 1833 to 1840.1 The early chapters of John Andrews’s definitive A Paper Landscape document the creation of a separate branch of the Ordnance Survey specifically for Ireland.2 Irish proprietors applied pressure for a new valuation of the country-side.3 A subsequent parliamentary committee recommended that a new survey go ahead on a large scale and charged Colby with its establishment. The adoption of the report of this committee—chaired by Thomas Spring Rice (1790–1866), later Lord Monteagle, a prominent Whig and the proprietor of Mount Trenchard, County Limerick—was not a foregone conclusion. Despite commending the proposed survey and valuation as a “great national work,”4 the [End Page 51] committee’s recommendations were in advance of the intentions of the government.5 The committee had not been formed merely to rubber-stamp an extension of the British system to Ireland. For the committee to propose an effective valuation at the local level, it required townland boundaries on the new map, a cartographic challenge that Colby already had indicated was possible. Moreover, a formidable shadow loomed over its proceedings in the person of the Duke of Wellington who, as master general of Ordnance, had the final decision about how the survey would proceed. The duke was chary of extending the project’s inquiry to include “dealing with divisions of a territorial nature rather than the natural geography of the country” (OSR (1846), 104). The committee’s vote of confidence in incipient military arrangements already underway for the Irish Survey may have been a gambit to make Wellington more receptive to the inclusion of townland boundaries. It was only the persistence of the dogged chancellor of the exchequer, Thomas Spring Rice, who presented individual evidence of the committee members to Wellington, which elicited an agreement that the Ordnance Survey would produce a townland map. Spring Rice considered the townland borders as adding to the Ordnance Survey, but not superseding it (OSR (1846), 104); his opinion proved a momentous decision in the history of early nineteenth-century Ireland. With Wellington’s blessing, this new venture possessed, at least in its early days, the authority of Britain’s most eminent statesman.6 Putting the Irish Survey in the hands of the Board of Ordnance inevitably meant that it would be military in character. A military approach to such projects had been the case in Great Britain since the late 1700s in India, and in Ireland [End Page 52] where Sir William Petty had employed soldiers two hundred years previous. Was there, in fact, an alternative to using military expertise? In British eyes, probably not. There was a widespread perception that the skill base in Ireland was inadequate to the task, as well as a sense that there was a need to employ servants of the state in peacetime in a manner that would use and advance their scientific training, and “keep their minds in a state of activity, ready for war.”7 This last concern is relevant in the context of the Survey of Great Britain being already well advanced at the time. In addition, the government would find a military operation much easier to control...