Maggie O'Farrell Introduces Her New Book and the Inspiration Behind It
A Letter from Maggie
A hundred and fifty years ago, an Irish surveyor and cartographer was inspired to paint a minuscule medallion in the upper right-hand corner of a map, of a size that would be visible only under a magnifying glass. In it, a red-jacketed soldier is looking into a theodolite mounted on a tripod; behind him stands a bearded man in a turned-up hat. There is a certain anxiety in his stance, in his hovering presence behind the soldier.
The man is my great-great-grandfather, recognisable from the single photograph we have of him, and from the briefest of mentions in the records of the Ordnance Survey. This tiny, hidden portrait in the corner of a map was painted by none other than his son, my great-grandfather, and it hangs in the hallway of the house in which I grew up.
Land is a novel I’ve wanted to write for a long time, about a father and son mapping together on the coastline of the Wild Atlantic Way. Beyond this portrait, my great-great-grandfather was not an easy man to find. It was a search that would take me to dusty stacks of archives, to churchyards, to holy wells, to remote islands and rocky hillsides, all of which offered me glimpses into what it would have been like to work as a labourer for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the 1850s, a decade or so after the Great Hunger had ravaged the country.
