An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part One)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Intelligence Squared

Episode: An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part One)

Host: Claire Almerstead
Guest: Maggie O’Farrell
Date: July 11, 2026

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Main Theme

This live Intelligence Squared event features acclaimed writer Maggie O’Farrell discussing her new historical novel, Land. The conversation, held at the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, delves into family memory, the fraught inheritance of Irish history, and the art of transforming myth and research into immersive fiction. O’Farrell discusses her inspiration—her own family history, specifically her great-great-grandfather’s work in the Ordnance Survey during and after the Irish Famine—and explores themes of mapping, identity, and survival amid national trauma.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of the Novel and Family Myth

• Maggie reveals her childhood fascination with a family story that an ancestor drew the first ever map of Ireland—a myth that inspired her research for Land (05:07).
  • "All families have their myths... We were always told as children, was that one of our ancestors had drawn the first ever map of Ireland, which sounds like a great story, doesn't it? But obviously it's not entirely true." —Maggie O’Farrell (05:08)
• She details how, after locating her ancestor’s actual signature in the Ordnance Survey archives, the emotional impact confirmed the truth within myth (06:38).
  • "It was an incredible feeling that I was touching a piece of paper that I knew he had touched... there was actually truth in that myth." —Maggie O’Farrell (07:00)

2. Historical Backdrop: The Irish Famine and Mapping

• Context: The 19th-century mapping of Ireland, interrupted and rendered obsolete almost instantly by the devastating Famine, which caused massive population decline and social upheaval (07:40, 14:13).
  • The Ordnance Survey—run by the British Army—initially excluded Irish workers and was plagued by misunderstanding and cultural clashes (29:03–30:20).
• O’Farrell discusses how her forebear worked on the “second revision” of the Irish map after the Famine, marking a moment of immense societal change (07:20).

3. The Abstracted Setting and Creative Choices

• O’Farrell intentionally avoids naming the novel’s country directly to evoke the precarity and fluidity of place before official maps (11:31).
  • "What I wanted to do was to ask readers to imagine what... a state of maplessness... It's so hard for us now to imagine a time when we didn't have maps, let alone OS maps." —Maggie O’Farrell (11:51)
• She includes occasional real place names like Liverpool and Dublin—at her editor’s urging—to avoid clumsiness (12:44–12:54).

4. Character Focus: Family and Survival

• Tomas and Fina, orphans of the Famine, and their children are at the heart of the story—representing survival, recovery, and familial negotiation (13:31–14:41).
  • "The story that hasn't really been told is what it was like to survive and to stay... How did the country limp towards recovery?" —Maggie O’Farrell (14:00)
• Notably, the theme of agency and rebellion within the family, especially between Fina and Tomas, is highlighted in a lively reading from the novel (17:18–22:14).
  • "There must be a roof, windows, a door, a proper floor, a clean chimney that draws the smoke. And, you're to go back to making maps for the British." —Fina (read by Maggie O’Farrell) (20:47)
  • "How do women do that?" —Tomas (narrated) (21:39)

5. Personal Connection and Writing Process

• O’Farrell credits her own parenting and prior memoir as preparing her to capture historical family dynamics authentically (26:51–27:21).
  • "I think it's easier to write children and siblings if you've had children, possibly." —Maggie O’Farrell (27:08)
• The creative breakthrough for the novel arrived as an epiphany during a train journey (15:29–17:05).

6. Mapping as Power, Culture, and Memory

• The novel explores multiple layers of meaning in mapping: as colonial tool, as assertion of memory, and as lived, almost spiritual knowledge (27:21–27:56).
  • "You've got the ordinance survey mapping, which is the colonial imposition of maps. And then you've got what Thomas has in his head... a sort of spiritual memory of place." —Claire Almerstead (27:47)
• Maggie reflects on the duality: mapping as both assertion of power and a way for local “shanachies” to preserve indigenous names and stories (31:59–32:58).
  • "I read that men like my great-great-grandfather... if they hadn't worked the Ordnance Survey, the maps would have been so much less accurate... They were the ones translating and finding out the history of ownership... a shanachy... someone who's trying to preserve." —Maggie O’Farrell (32:10)
• She provides anecdotes about the practical challenges (e.g., locals moving trig points to sabotage surveyors) and details on the tools and processes of historic mapping (34:19–35:46).

7. Colonialism, Identity, and the Transmission of Knowledge

• The novel also touches on Ireland “exporting” mapping expertise, with the Ordnance Survey’s colonial techniques brought to India and beyond (33:32–34:05).
• O’Farrell underlines that mapping required both technical and social savvy—surveyors needed mathematical and linguistic skill, knowledge of local languages and folklore (33:17–33:32).

8. Physical Endurance and the Human Landscape

• The conversation underscores the bodily labor and travel endured by characters (and real people) in the mapping and in migration during/after the Famine (36:02–36:57).
  • Reference to the folk song “Rocky Road to Dublin” as evoking the scale and hardship of these journeys.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "There must be a roof, windows, a door, a proper floor, a clean chimney that draws the smoke. And, you're to go back to making maps for the British." —Fina (Maggie O’Farrell reading) (20:47)
• "How do women do that?" —Tomas (Maggie O’Farrell reading) (21:39)
• "I became very interested in mapping... It's a really strong human instinct. It actually predates our ability to write. The first known map in the world is an Iron Age etching on the side of a rock..." —Maggie O’Farrell (27:56)
• "Men like my great, great grandfather, if they hadn't worked the Ordnance Survey, the maps would have been so much less accurate..." —Maggie O’Farrell (32:10)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [05:07] Family myth and archival research inspiration
• [07:20] The historical and personal backdrop: Great Famine and mapping
• [11:31] Abstracting place—avoiding naming Ireland/England
• [13:31] Family dynamics post-Famine as a unique focus
• [17:18–22:14] Maggie O’Farrell’s reading from Land (meet the family)
• [27:21–27:56] On mapping as both colonial tool and spiritual memory
• [31:59–32:58] The role of local mapmakers as shanachies (oral historians)
• [34:19–35:46] Research revelations: the reality of historical mapping tools
• [36:02–36:57] Endurance, migration, and “Rocky Road to Dublin”

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Tone & Language

The episode is warm, reflective, and often humorous, especially during exchanges about family quirks, the chaos of parenthood, and the challenges of research. O’Farrell balances a deep empathy for her subjects—living and historic—with critical insight into colonialism, memory, and the limits of official history.

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Takeaway

This conversation provides an intimate look at the intersection between personal family myth, national tragedy, and the reconstructive power of the novel. O’Farrell’s thoughtful navigation of mapping—both literal and metaphoric—invites listeners to reconsider how the stories and scars of the past are inherited, recovered, and reimagined.

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Transcript

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[Mia Sorrenti]

to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorrenti. How can a novel bring the lives of the past vividly into the present? Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with award winning author of Hamlet, Maggie o'. Farrell. O' Farrell joined us at the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange to discuss history, memory and the art of historical fiction. Marking the publication of her new novel, Land, o' Farrell reflects on the lives of ordinary people shaped by extraordinary moments in history. Drawing on her own family history and the aftermath of the Irish Famine, she explores how fiction can illuminate the past with emotional truth and compassion. Let's join our host, Claire Almerstead now live at the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange.

[Claire Almerstead]

Hello and a very warm welcome. You've all come to see the phenomenon that is Maggie o'. Farrell. So Maggie was born in Derry, Londonderry rather than in Coleraine, wasn't it?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I was born in Paul Rain. County Dairy.

[Claire Almerstead]

Yeah, County Dairy, that's right. I got a bit confused over that.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

There's quite a different lots of different

[Claire Almerstead]

sorts of dairies which is relevant because you may not people may not be aware that you are Irish and that is what is absolutely central to this novel. And it's a bit of a departure for you at least recently. She's one of the most admired writers in this country, one of the few writers. I was just talking to, the organizer about, about it, who now is capable of filling almost, well, filling sort of whole huge theatres. And she has sold something like 40 million books all around the world. And this was even before she got to walk the red carpet in Hollywood this year. I'm now really embarrassing you, aren't I? And she won her most recent novel, before this was of course, Hamnet, for which she won the women's prize. And. And also. Did you win the Oscar for it? You did, didn't you?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

No, you didn't. Well, Jessie Buckley won an Oscar.

[Claire Almerstead]

No, but not for the best adapted screenplay. No.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

We were nominated.

[Claire Almerstead]

You were nominated. So you saw her. I don't know how many of you saw her in that glorious pink dress, going and insisting on doing your own styling. It was so cool. She's so cool. Anyway, so she's come back with this amazing novel, Land, which was only published on, I think it was Tuesday, so you won't have had the chance to read it. I came in to do this at short notice and I have galloped through it, which it actually puts me in a very nice position. I am so steeped in land. It is a very immersive novel. It's a very big novel and it's a very Irish novel. So before. Before I start asking Maggie questions, I just want to say that we want to. We'll be talking to. For about an hour. You probably know this if you come to these events here regularly, but just in case, then there'll be half an hour for questions. There are two standing mics at the sides which we would like you to walk to if you possibly can. If you have any problems with mobility, stick a hand up and we'll do our best to get a roving mic to you. Anyway, so let's start. Welcome, Maggie. Welcome to Brighton.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here.

[Claire Almerstead]

So the book, this book, a novel, is inspired by your great. And a story that you only got to know about quite recently, or you investigated quite recently. Tell us how you came to know about it.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, I think all families have their myths, and many of them, and one in my family, one that we were always told as children, was that one of our ancestors had worked or I think. I mean, I remember as a child thinking or knowing that one of my ancestors had drawn the first ever map of Ireland, which sounds like a great story, doesn't it? But obviously it's not entirely true. But when I was a child we used to. So obviously you can tell by the way I speak. I left Ireland when I was quite young and I grew up mostly in Britain, but we used to go back every summer. So I used to look at. He always really fascinated me, this kind of ancestor. And I used to look out of the window of our car as we drove through Derry or Donegal or Galway and I used to imagine, I mean, I kind of imagined him as a sort of one man band, probably in some kind of unspecified period dress, definitely some kind of cravat. And he was probably holding a kind of 20 centimeter meter rule that was the ruler, that was the kind of biggest distance I could imagine. But obviously that was all total nonsense, as it turns out. And more recently I went looking for him in a more kind of serious way just to see how much truth there is. Because I think in all myths there's always a seed at least of truth or a strand of truth. So I started in the Ordnance Survey archives in Dublin. And he was actually very hard to find, mostly because if you were Irish and you worked for the Ordnance Survey, which was a British organization and it was mostly run by the British army, if you worked for them in Ireland in the 19th century, you weren't allowed to sign your own work. It had to be signed by a British army officer. So there were lots of, you know, field notebooks, measurements, observations, draft maps, loads of them. But I couldn't tell which were his. There were some which I thought might be his, but I wasn't sure. But I did find his signature under a list of labourers. It was under a kind of memorandum that all the labourers, as they were termed, the Irish were termed labourers. I found his signature and that was extraordinary. Actually, it was a really amazing moment because not only was there that incredible feeling that I was touching a piece of paper that I knew he had touched, but also that there was actually truth in that myth. We were told as children that he did exist and he really did. And he wasn't a one man band, very far from it. But yeah, he had worked on. Actually he worked on the second revisions. So the first version of the map of Ireland was made between. It was made sort of between 1820 and 1840. But then if anyone knows anything about Irish history, you know that in 1846, the Angol tomorrow the great hunger struck. And so that first version of the map which had taken 22 years to do, which is quite astonishing, really, for quite a small country, it became immediately obsolete. And so there was a second group because of the famine, and so they had to do the work on the second revision. So I was really struck by the date which he began working for the Ordnance Survey, which was in the later years of the great Famine. And, you know, I always feel that, I mean, you're always told in kind of creating writing workshops that you should write what you know. But I always feel, for me anyway, fiction comes from the opposite. It comes from something I don't know, or a question. And for me, my question was, what must that task possibly have been like to be setting down the enormous human geography and physical geography changes that had happened to Ireland during those years?

[Claire Almerstead]

But you also have a little picture of him.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yes, well, we didn't realise we had a picture of him, but. So we have in our house a map, a hand drawn map that's about the size of a hardback book opened up and it's drawn by my great grandfather, who's the son of this.

[Claire Almerstead]

Sorry, who was called Liam. Like the son in the book is called Liam.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, he's in the book, he's called Liam. That's not actually his real name. Oh, I thought that it was, yeah. And he. So he and the father, those father, son, pair, had always really interested me because we knew that the great grandfather. Sorry, there's a lot of great greats and grandfathers in this story. The great great grandfather, who's called Tomas in the book, the original Mappa, we knew that his son, my great grandfather, had become a Jesuit, which is not really a job you just drift into. You know, you have to be incredibly committed to it quite a young age and is in years and years and years of very, very concentrated academic and theological study. But obviously, because I exist and my siblings and all my cousins who exist, he didn't stay a Jesuit. Someone, when I was telling the story, once asked me, they said, did he leave the Jesuit or was he just not a very good Jesuit? We believe it's the latter. Yeah. And he went full circle and became a mapper like his father. And that relationship really interests me. I mean, partly because, you know, joining the church is an enormous deal in Ireland and leaving it is an even bigger deal. So anyway, so sorry, this is a very long answer to your question. So Liam, my great grandfather, had drawn this hand drawn map. It sits in the style of an OS map and it's of an imaginary place and it's been hanging in Our house for years. And just a few years ago, when I was actually starting to try to find the man I called Tomas in the book, for whatever reason, I took a magnifying glass to it and in the corner are these little tiny medallions which are about the size of an old postage stamp. And if you look at them under a magnifying glass, I realise that inside is a little tiny portrait of Tomas, his father, which was extraordinary and none of us had ever noticed that before. And it's a really. I mean, he must have painted it with a brush of only about three bristles because it's tiny and it's him. And we know it's him because we've got one photograph of him and he's standing behind a British soldier who's wearing the red jacket and the soldier is looking through a theodolite. So it's an extraordinary portrait of him working and it's quite politically charged as well.

[Claire Almerstead]

If you want to see it and you go to the Guardian to a piece that Maggie wrote, the Guardian. It is actually in there. You can see it. It's incredibly moving because there's this, you know, the red soldier who's taking the foreground and in the background is this very tentative figure.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

He looks quite anxious. Yeah, he does. So small. But there's somehow something. He looks a bit anxious about the whole scenario.

[Claire Almerstead]

So you don't ever, I think, mention the words England or Ireland and you set it on a peninsula. You just say on the peninsula. So you've made it abstract, you're not touching bases, obviously. Tell us about the thinking behind that.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, the peninsula where most of the book is set is. It is fictional, but it's a kind of amalgam of. I mean, obviously the west coast of Ireland is full of peninsulas. It's a very fibrillated landscape, sort of coastline full of fjords. But I think what I wanted to do was to ask readers to imagine what. Imagine a state of maplessness. Because it's so hard for us now to imagine a time when we didn't have maps, let alone OS maps. I mean, all of us walk about with little tiny GPSs in our pockets these days. It's really hard to imagine a time when the maps didn't exist and you had to rely on people, local people directing you, all the stars or a kind of memory in some way. It's really hard to imagine that. So I wanted. That's why I don't mention the word island in Irish and British and Britain. And it's Just. Well, the book's called Land.

[Claire Almerstead]

You mention Liverpool and Cork.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Dublin has mentioned it's true. And I did at one point have no place names. And my editor did say, I think we're gonna have to have a few

[Claire Almerstead]

because otherwise you get only just when

[Maggie O'Farrell]

they're leaving, you just get very kind of ugly, clumsy sentences. Otherwise, a town that's on the other side of the water, it just, you know, it sounds horrible. Yes.

[Claire Almerstead]

So let's just go into the characters then. Thomas, you've mentioned, who and his wife grew up in the workhouse. And so they were orphans of the great famine. So it's got this extraordinarily emotive backstory to it which surfaces in shards through the. The present of the novel.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, on the one hand, I wanted the novel to be about a family emerging from the long shadow of the great famine. And I was interested in, I mean, historical record focuses, and rightly so, on the million or so people that died of starvation or starvation related disease. And also I feel as though the narrative of the other, between 1 and 2 million people were forced to emigrate. So Ireland lost a third, third of its population during the great famine. And I feel it's quite a familiar narrative to us. The people that left and started, if they survived the journey, which was not a given, if they started a new life in say, North America or Canada. That feels to me a story that's been told many times, but I think the story that hasn't really been told what it was like to survive and to stay. And that was what interested me, I think, with this novel. How did the country limp towards recovery? And I read, I think it's only in the last five years that the population of Ireland has just reached pre famine levels. So that's 180 years it's taken. And if you take that as a symbolism of recovery, that's a long time.

[Claire Almerstead]

And it's left scars on the landscape, hasn't it? You know, you can see tumble down remains of, of cottages when they were just swept away.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, I mean, the whole landscape, the human physical geography was really changed. I think among many other things that were changed by the disaster. You know, whole villages were wiped out and estates were completely redrawn. And I mean, so many people died. There were mass graves, of course, and so many people were evicted and forced to leave.

[Claire Almerstead]

And so in the present of the novel, he is there with his family. He lives in a small cottage. He has his wife who was with him in the workhouse, and they're children and it's interesting that the audiobook is read by a man. So you think of Thomas and Liam as being the centre of it, do you?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, they were always a starting point for me. I think my way into the story, you know, I've been thinking about them for years and I knew that I wanted to try and write a novel about them. This father son relationship and the idea of mapping and colonialism and empire, it was all I knew that all those strands really fascinated me. But I couldn't for a really long time see a way into making it a novel. I couldn't. It just seemed. I mean, I couldn't really write. Just here are some things that I find interesting. There's quite a long distance between some stuff I'd quite like to read about and novel, and I couldn't see my way into it. And then actually, it was quite an unusual experience. I mean, I do think all the books you write are different and have a different kind of. Kind of inception and different joys and different challenges. So I'd been thinking about it for a long time and I'd never been able to work out how to do it. And then I was on a train going from Belfast to Dublin and it was delayed, so I was looking out the window. And as I was on that journey, just the first this sentence came into my head and it was, his father was ever a man of few words. And it was really. I mean, I'd never had this experience before. I suddenly thought, I know what that is. That's the first line of the novel. And I knew that it had to be about. It was going to be a novel. But many things were also about silence and language and speaking and not speaking and. Yeah, and different languages. So it was really. And as I was on the train, it was lucky it was denied because I could suddenly see the whole novel. It was a bit like finding a map, ironically. And it kind of opened out in front of me and I suddenly saw how to do it.

[Claire Almerstead]

So we've mentioned Thomas and Liam, we haven't mentioned the other ones. So I wonder whether you could read a bit and introduce us through a reading to the rest of the characters.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

So I haven't got my reading glasses and it's not that much light, so who knows what's going to happen? I might have to make it up, see if I can remember it. No, I can see, actually. So this is a point in the book where Tomas and Liam have been mapping on a peninsula in the west of Ireland. Tomas loves the work, Liam does not he's the child, he's about 10 years old at this point, and they have found a scrap of ancient woodland which they realize isn't on the map, and they go into it to start surveying it, but instead they have a slightly I don't want to give too many spoilers, but they have a rather extraordinary encounter and this changes the course of their whole life and Tomas decides to bring the family who are living in a town called Dublin, an unspecified country. He brings them to live on the peninsula and his wife Thena is just before I read the scene. She's really unimpressed by the house that he has arranged for them to live in, and she's walked back down the hill and said I'm not going to live there. When Tomas returns down to the shore he finds his children at play. Enda has Rose on her back with Rose's hands over her eyes, and Liam is leading them around and around the widow's house. Inside, Fina and the widow are standing over a steaming laundry pot, laughing at something, their four hands employed in scrubbing. There is a general air of mutual approval, of female complicity. He glances at the long table, then away, feeling oddly wrong footed, for he had expected to find Fina sitting forlornly by the cart, surrounded by miserable children, grateful that he'd returned in a perhaps more pliant frame of mind. He had not counted on this situation, Fina finding a friend and a place at the widow's side. I thought, Tomas began, that if we fixed up a sheet from the gable wall, then the two women are looking up at him with identical scornful gazes. I'll not go back, fina says. What? Tomas says, astonished. But we agreed. We did not agree, veena says, wringing out a cloth, twisting it into a rope between her hands. Far from it. You took the money without telling me. You said there was a house for us, that she dips her chin in the direction of the hill is not a house. I will not live in an eviction ruin. How could you ask me to do such a thing? I'll not have this baby on a hillside. I will not. All right, all right. He cuts across her testily. If I mend it, if I put on a roof. Fina seems to consider this. She slaps the wet steaming garment back into the water. Tomas is sure that he sees the widow mutter something to her from the corner of her mouth. Fina gives her an answering, flecks of her eyebrow. There must be a roof, she says, pointing at him in a way he has never seen before. Windows, a door, a proper floor, a clean chimney that draws the smoke. And, she says, delivering her trump card, you're to go back to making maps for the British. Tomas is aghast. Never, he says heatedly, shifting from foot to foot. I will never do that again. I told you, I'll not take their money. I'll not be in their pay in there. Then. I will not live in that place. And neither will the children. Tomas grips at his jacket cuffs with tense hands. He glances from one woman to the other and sees that they have cooked up these terms between them. Why did he ever let her come down here on her own? Why hadn't he followed her when she walked off? Come away outside, he says gruffly, just the two of us, and we'll talk this over. Oh, she murmurs. Now you want to talk. The widow bows her head as if to hide a smile, and Tomas cannot believe that this alliance has been formed so swiftly, so completely in the time he was up the hill. How do women do that? Veena lifts her chin, wiping her wet hands on her apron, and advances upon him. Listen to me, Tomas, she says in a soft and to him menacing voice. I know you want this life with your own land, your own little house, beholden to no one. But that is not really how things are, is it? We will still be beholden to the viscount because we'll owe him rent every single month, and we'll be at the mercy of the land, all its ups and downs. We? She circles a hand to include him herself. The widow know only too well how that can end. I will not let my children go hungry. I will not be turfed out of my house. You may fix the cottage, you may sow your crops, you may keep a cow, and I will milk it for you. But I will only live here on this peninsula if you continue to bring in those wages. If you won't do that, I will not stay. Tomas stares at his wife, so diminutive and determined, her belly pushed out with the unborn child. He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. He removes the scar from around his neck and for want of anything better to do, throws it down on the table. Veena gives her husband a final nod. A roof mind, she says. A hearth, a chimney, and you working on the maps. Then she finishes turning back to the laundry. We'll see. Thank you.

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[Claire Almerstead]

So that's Fina. His wife, who can give us gives as good as she gets, as do his children, because this is a family who are very close, but they're in a perpetual state of revolt against each other. You are a parent. You know about this sort of thing.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I do, I certainly do.

[Claire Almerstead]

You said at one point that you wouldn't have been ready to write it if you hadn't have written your memoir. I was wondering to what extent there was a relationship between those two things.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

No, I think I couldn't have written Hamlet unless I'd written my memoir. You know, I always think a book comes out of its predecessor sometimes, and I think I needed to write that first before I could somehow. But yes, I think, yeah, I think it's easier to write children and siblings if you've had children, possibly.

[Claire Almerstead]

Let's go back to this business of mapping and what it means. You've got two different systems of mapping in this. You've got the ordinance survey mapping, which is the colonial imposition of maps. And then you've got what Thomas has in his head, which is a different sort of mapping is the mapping of sort of A sort of. Almost a sort of woo woo memory,

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I would call it.

[Claire Almerstead]

Woo woo, he would call it. But it's a sort of spiritual memory of place, isn't it? Or an instinctive bodily reaction to place.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, well, I think I became, you know, obviously I became very interested in mapping while I was writing this book. And I. You know, it seems to me that it's a really strong human instinct. It actually predates our ability to write. You know, the first known map in the world is an Iron Age etching on the side of a rock in what's now the Italian Alps in a place called Bedolina. If you're ever there, please go and see. It's an astonishing sight. And somebody at that time has drawn this very intricate plan or map of the village in which they live in the fields and the huts. And it's such an interesting statement of, this is who I am and this is where I am. I mean, who knows, maybe they were all having a fight about who and which feel, and that's why they had to draw it. But I feel it was this very interesting human instinctive statement. And then, of course, you fast forward 1000 years and you come to the Roman Empire. And really from that point on, it's impossible to disentangle mapping from ownership and assuming power and colonialism. Because Romans would arrive in a country and they would build their roads and they would build their towns or take over the towns and rename, and then they would draw a map. And that was the final kind of staking the flag. You know, this is part of our empire now. And so, you know, and when the British began mapping Ireland in the 1820s, it was for taxation purposes. It was for a tax called cess tax. And even now in Ireland, there's a phrase which basically means something really quite rude, but they say bad cess to you because it goes right back linguistically to that taxation that everybody was very obviously very resentful of. So it was. I mean, it was a huge undertaking. And the British decided to do it at a very large scale. It was six inches to a mile, which was much bigger than anywhere else they were doing. And they initially thought it was going to take them seven years. And they had a ruling that they weren't going to employ any Irish in the 1820s. It just had to be British. And it was an absolute disaster because, of course, they couldn't communicate with people and names and land ownership is very complicated. And, you know, the land has been occupied by so many different people and divided up into Plantations and estates. And they discovered that people on one side of a mountain had. And one name for it, and people on the other side had another name for it. And it was in Irish. Nobody could understand it, and they had

[Claire Almerstead]

to simplify the names down.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

That's a running joke, isn't it? Yeah. So it didn't last. I mean, they thought it would take them seven years. Actually took them 22. The other thing that happened was that the locals were obviously slightly alarmed when they saw this large army division roll into town. So nobody was feeling particularly helpful. And also, the surveyors are part of the army. And the Ordnance Survey would spend sometimes days and weeks setting up their trig point, which, of course, is the place where all the accurate distances are measured from. I have read accounts that sometimes in the night, the locals would just move it a few feet just to mess with them. They'd have to start all over again. So, anyway, I mean, a long story short, they realized quite sort of somewhere in the middle of this seven years that they hoped for and 22 years that it took, that they had to employ some Irish people, one of whom, it turns out, later on, was my great, great grandfather, because they needed to. And they did actually open a division called the toponymy division, which was all about trying to get a really accurate translation of the place names and to make sure that Ireland's history and complex linguistic background was preserved on the maps.

[Claire Almerstead]

Now, you see that Thomas has no power, which he doesn't technically, but you also raised the possibility that he did have power to not mention things. So there's a place that he leaves out of the map because he knows if he puts it in the map, the local landowner will come and exploit it.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, that's right.

[Claire Almerstead]

Is this something you've researched, or was that your imagination?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I mean, I think. You know, I think I was wondering when I started the book how. What it must have been like to be Irish and to be working on this project and whether you were treated by other Irish people, whether you were disapproved of. But actually thinking about the epigraph of the book is the word shanachy, which is an Irish word for a traditional storyteller and also an oral historian. And I realized that men like my great, great grandfather, if they hadn't worked the Ordnance Survey, the maps would have been so much less accurate. You know, it was there. They were the ones who were translating and finding out the history of ownership on this estate or this land or this tiny small holding, and they were the ones who could Actually say, you know, we can't call this town something completely made up in English. It has to be related to, you know, the history and the actual original name of this town or this field. So I began to see him in a very different light. And I saw them really as a shanakey. Really someone who's actually trying to preserve. I know. And mapping just seemed to me, you know, I think when I started, I was just imagining it was kind of just measuring things, but it's not. It's a kind of really complex discipline which combines algebra and mathematics.

[Claire Almerstead]

Pythagoras.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, Pythagoras. The whole of the country is divided up into triangles. And. Yeah, I mean, it made me want to cry because I was so bad at maths at school, and linguistics and history and folklore, it's everything. They were Renaissance men, these people.

[Claire Almerstead]

And then you mentioned that Liam becomes a Jesuit. And so then you have a little. It's almost like a coda, but it is coda that's folded into the novel of Ireland exporting mapmaking colonialism to India.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

That's right. Well, the Ordnance Survey were in India. I think I could be wrong about this. Just after Ireland. Yeah. It didn't take them. It took them about half the time to map India, which is amazing. Maybe there were a lot of trig points that were moved. Who knows?

[Claire Almerstead]

And Liam has this line, he's teaching a lot of little Indian children in Calcutta, and he says that. He says the importance of Pythagoras is because this whole vast map of the country is divided up into triangles and triangles.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's funny, the research is such a strange thing, because I read, you know, I read books about the history of the Ordnance Survey and I kind of made notes on them and I sort of understood that it was triangles and Pythagoras theorem. And then actually, I went quite late on when I was first doing one of the. Almost final, maybe the penultimate draft, somebody I knew, somebody who had antique mapping tools. And so I said, can I come and see them? And, you know, I mean, I do believe that you can learn anything you want to from books, but there's also the aspect of actually handling something, you know, physically picking something up or getting your hands dirty in a way, which I think is a really important part of research. So one of the. In the opening scene, you know, I read that people had measuring chains. And I think in my head I'd imagined something that was maybe a couple of meters long and sort of the kind of chain that you get on a fence. And I had written a description of someone slinging it over their shoulder and then chucking it on the ground. And then when I actually saw one, I mean, it's a massive iron beast of a thing and the links are about this long and it would take at least two, if not four people to unravel it. And it has a huge iron beautiful claw that you stick in the ground at one end. And so I thought, I really need to go and rewrite that scene. No one's going to be tossing this over their shoulder.

[Claire Almerstead]

But Theodolite in the picture, the little picture that you have, it's a big thing, isn't it?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

It's a sort of person sized thing. I mean, you know, it beggars belief really that they were. These people were mapping on foot. You know, they probably had a cart to drag all the equipment, which was heavy, but they were mostly walking the land and doing it footstep by footstep.

[Claire Almerstead]

Yeah. And one of the things that the novel is very good at is sort of giving a sense of the enormous distances people went across and the enormous physical endurance they had. I mean, it's quite astonishing. I mean, you know, there's Thomas and Liam going all over the country without very much food, lugging these huge, huge bags. But then you have months in the

[Maggie O'Farrell]

ship in the hole. The distances are astonishing. Well, there's a very famous Irish traditional folk song called Rocky Road to Dublin which actually is featured in a film recently. I discovered there are a lot of 20 somethings who are listening to it. And I listened to it again and it reminded me that in the song, the man walks from Tuam, which is in Galway, to Dublin. And then he goes over and he goes to Liverpool. I mean, that's a long way to what? And he talks about. About cutting himself a blackthorn and putting on a new pair of brogues because it's a long way and it is a long way, but that's what people did. If you were looking for work, you

[Claire Almerstead]

walked across the whole country, mainly the men, and then the women would be at home having to keep the cow milked.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Pennies, if you were lucky enough to have a cow, I think. Yeah.

[Mia Sorrenti]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a [e-mail] membership. If you'd like to join us at any future live events, you can find our full program or buy [e-mail] attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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