Mapping, measurement and metropolis

How land surveyors shaped eighteenth-century Dublin

Finnian Ó Cionnaith

This comprehensively illustrated book charts the exceptional impact that a small group of land surveyors had on the development of Dublin city during the eighteenth century. Written with unique technical insight, this book examines an industry that was simultaneously a mixture of art, science and business and left the city with a diverse and vibrant cartographic heritage. Its practitioners ranged from professionals and artists to frauds and rogues. Dublin’s surveyors dealt with the city’s richest lords and its poorest tenants, providing the images onto which some of the most interesting and important stories of eighteenth-century Dublin are told. Despite their relatively small numbers, they played a unique and fundamental role in shaping Dublin into what it is today. The book begins with a foreword by John H. Andrews.

Finnian Ó Cionnaith is a practising land surveyor and has worked in a variety of surveying roles on three continents. In 2011 he recieved a PhD in history from NUI Maynooth.