The Irish Ordnance Survey

History, culture and memory

Gillian Doherty

‘This book is a major contribution to Irish intellectual history; it transcends the Irish dimension because the issues it addresses are of worldwide significance. The book is essentially about the manner in which a dominant and victorious culture treats a defeated culture, a conquered culture; how that defeated culture strives to extricate from the debris of conquest some sense of self respect and how it tries to adapt to circumstances largely beyond its control; how it tries to preserve something of what went before it if, in this case, in a different language. Doherty, in this remarkably mature study, illuminates a whole range of activities and experiences that enhance our self-understanding, once we engage with them. It is a work of originality, incisiveness and erudition and the subject is treated with skill and style’, Professor Joe Lee.

'A lively and exquisitely referenced history of the memoir process and, more innovatively, as assessment of the content …. Gillian Doherty has written a fine book that will delight any student of the nineteenth century or Irish map history’, Matthew Stout, Studia Hibernica.

'An expansive and invaluable intellectual history of Ireland … a sophisticated, erudite and thoroughly engrossing account of an epic journey into Ireland’s distant past …  This is an indisputably valuable and informed analysis of a cultural heritage which will become required reading for future scholars exploring the origins and development of Irish nationality’, Thomas E. Hachey, Irish Literary Supplement.

‘The Irish Ordnance Survey is an insightful and thoughtful work and fulfils the author’s promise of exploring the historical, cultural and archaeological work of the survey’, Clara Cullen, UCD History Review.

‘In this interesting and well-researched study, Gillian M. Doherty offers the first detailed account of the Survey’s historical and cultural research and explores its implications for Irish national identity … Doherty is to be congratulated for bringing unexplored facets of the Ordnance Survey’s work to our attention. Those interested in the larger issues she raises will surely regard this study as an essential starting point’, Michael De Nie, American Historical Review (April 2006).