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networking ireland in the nineteenth-century: the role of cartography Jacinta Prunty Key words: Ireland, cartography, railways, mapping, traffic. The complexity of communications within towns, and the many ways in which communications took place, has been highlighted by Derek Keene in his contribution to this volume. In the process of developing communications in nineteenth-century Ireland, map-making played a central role, as this paper will argue. The Ordnance Survey six-inch townland maps (figure 1, Galway example) carried a far greater amount of information (figure 2, characteristic sheet) than their scale (1:10,560) would suggest, while these maps were quickly supplemented by large-scale town maps. Maps were central to town planning, and cartography was itself a major vehicle of communication for ambitious infrastructural projects. Maps and their associated records are major sources of information on the modernising process of ‘networking Ireland’ that proceeded apace from c.1830 (for example, figure 3, passenger traffic 1837). This paper focuses particularly on the topographical evidence for communication within the Irish town, drawing on the published volumes of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, Royal Irish Academy, and associated sources in map history. The Irish Historic Towns Atlas project, under the auspices of the International Commission for the History of Towns (ICHT), has published fascicles of seventeen towns to date, with several more, including Galway city, in active preparation.1 A selection of historic maps is reprinted for each town (for example, figures 4 and 5, from Belfast), while the 1:2,500 nineteenth-century reconstruction map (figure 6), 1 See bibliography, also listed online at Irish HistoricTowns Atlas, Royal Irish Academy, http://www.ria.ie/ ihta/. 131 which is created for each of the national atlases produced under the ICHT, is based on contemporary manuscript and printed surveys. Information on the communications network within each town may be drawn directly from the maps; features such as ferries , bridges, canals, railway lines and stations, roads and harbours all bear testimony to the town’s ‘connectedness’. The Irish Historic Towns Atlas goes somewhat further in revealing the communications network through its gazetteer of topographical information ; transport (no. 17, including fords, ferries, bridges, stables, milestones, mail coach offices) is the most obvious heading under which to commence an exploration of ‘networking’, but other sections are also valuable in exploring the broader field of town communications. Trades and services (no. 16, including fairs, markets, inns, newspaper offices, auction rooms, banks); manufacturing (no. 15, including mills, breweries, woollen manufactories), administration (no. 13, including exchequer, mint, Tholsel, post office), entertainment (no. 21, including meeting rooms for religious, political, trade union, scientific and philanthropic groups) may also be considered. One of the organisations most interested in rapid intra-urban and inter-urban communication in nineteenth-century Ireland was the military (see under defence, no. 12, military barracks), resulting in some most useful network maps (figure 7 Galway and figure 8 Dublin). The gazetteer of topographical information in the Irish Historic Towns Atlas is based upon cartographic evidence but supplemented by a wide variety of complementary evidence including commercial directories, visitors’ accounts, state inquiries and other primary sources as listed in each fascicle, distinguishing between sources specific to that town and those which cover urban centres more generally in Ireland. the move towards ‘networking ireland’ in the s Networking Ireland was one of the pre-eminent concerns in the decades leading up to the famine of 1845-7. During the 1830s it was a theme that dominated public discourse, when the extent of the poverty endured by the vast bulk of the population became less easy to ignore. The collapse of tillage prices in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars (post 1815), subdivision of tiny holdings in rural areas and multiple occupancy of dwellings scarcely fit for one family in urban districts,2 successive outbreaks of typhoid and cholera, and the influx of huge numbers of the lowest strata of workers into British cities, desperate for employment, were incontrovertible signs of the economic disaster that was Ireland. Travellers from the continent were astounded by the lack of domestic comforts in the homes of the majority, the poor standards 2 Jacinta Prunty, Dublin slums 1800-1925, a study in urban geography, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998, pp 38-61. networking ireland in the nineteenth-century: the role of cartography| jacinta prunty 132 of cultivation, and the levels of vagrancy they encountered everywhere.3 In brief, ‘all reports, all accounts and narratives of the condition of the poor of Ireland tell...

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