Published 30 January 2026
Maps shape how societies understand land, power, and place. Long before satellites and smartphones, maps helped determine the outcome of battles, fixed boundaries, underpinned taxation, and asserted state authority. Early maps were often symbolic rather than accurate, with distorted coastlines, unreliable distances, and regions compressed or stretched to fit limited knowledge and cultural or political bias. Over time, advances in navigation, astronomy, mathematics, and surveying transformed mapping into a precise scientific discipline, leaving a remarkable visual record of changing landscapes, settlements, and political ambition.
Today, digital mapping is woven into everyday life through satnav systems, online maps, and location-based services, yet the technologies and global reference systems that underpin them are rarely understood. Modern digital cartography rests on foundations laid by generations of surveyors who measured the world with chains, theodolites, and triangulation long before satellites existed.
This blog tells the story of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland from its nineteenth-century height through partition, decline, and renewal, to the technological transformations of the modern era. It is written from the perspective of someone who has spent a professional lifetime within that tradition, working in all three Ordnance Surveys on these islands, and later at a European level. Bringing together history, surveying science, cartographic technology, and personal experience, the blog offers an informed, first-hand perspective on how Ireland’s mapping organisations have continually evolved, and how its mapping has always stood at the intersection of knowledge, power, and place, and very much the product of a country’s people, culture, and history.
