UCD Digital Library is delighted to present a fascinating collection of large scale 19th century Irish town and city maps. This visual resource has been made possible due to a long-standing and successful partnership with Ordnance Survey Ireland. The OSI provided the UCD Digital Library with scanned images of the five foot and ten foot to one mile scale maps chiefly surveyed between 1837 and 1896.
The Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI) 19th Century Historical Maps collection contains maps for almost 150 cities, towns and villages in the Republic of Ireland. Significantly, the large scale at which they were surveyed means that wonderful details such as the ground floor interior plans of public buildings from churches and banks to hospitals and railway terminals can be viewed on the maps. Find the maps by date and place and then zoom in on the beautiful cartographic detail.
These maps provide an invaluable source of information for anyone tracing the history of their family or local area. Researchers can compare the past to the present and find former street names, discover which industries formerly occupied sites, study transformations in the landscape to see how an urban site has emerged from a rural area. At street level features include benchmarks, pillar boxes, public water pumps, gas plugs, hydrants and lamp posts. Other useful information includes the parish, barony, townland, ward and municipal boundaries which are all clearly marked. With building types such as mills, foundries, dye works, barracks shown not only is architectural history visualised but clues to working life in the past are revealed. Interested in 19th century forms of recreation – then locate places of culture and entertainment such as billiard rooms, galleries, tea houses, bull rings and Turkish baths.
The Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI) 19th Century Historical Maps provide a fantastic wealth of detail to explore.
The collection can be viewed in the UCD Digital Library at: http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:40377
The UCD Digital Library is an institutionally supported, preservation-oriented digital repository that holds a heterogeneous collection of resources from UCD’s cultural heritage repositories and an increasing number of data assets captured or produced by UCD research activities. It is accessible at http://digital.ucd.ie.