By SHELAGH BRALEY STARR
RELATED ☘️ Staff
PORTSMOUTH, NH, USA—Author Maggie O’Farrell turned a family myth—that her ancestor drew the first map of Ireland—into the imaginative terrain of her newest bestseller, LAND, she told a packed house at the Music Hall on a Friday night in late June.
“It was said, my great-great grandfather had made the first map of Ireland,” O’Farrell, author of many works including the blockbuster HAMNET, said with a wry laugh. Like many family historians, she believed the tale, wanting it to be true. “But because my work includes research, of course, I had to hunt it down and verify.”
She began her work as genealogists do, in the records office. She went looking for any proof.
And it turned out the story was at least partially true.
“I found a memorandum about it. And it turned out, he did not single-handedly map Ireland for the first time,” she told the crowd, laughing. “But he did participate in the revision, hired because he spoke Irish and English.”
Mapping itself is a colonial process, she pointed out. “It is the final act of ownership, to make a map. The English had tried before, without bringing in Irish speakers, which was difficult. The Irish were not allowed to sign any official documents at the time, and during the night, the locals would move the markers, just to make it more difficult. So it took a long time to complete the maps.”
Maps became obsolete shortly thereafter, she said, with the onset of An Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger). “Whole villages were wiped out, dead, left for other countries,” O’Farrell ticked off her fingers. “The Irish still carry the Great Hunger,” she said. “When the potato, a monoculture, failed, more than a million died. Belgium had a similar blight but only lost 50 thousand. Why so many more in Ireland?” she asked. “The answer is colonization.”
Set just after the Great Hunger in Ireland, LAND tells the story of a man and his son who do the first ordnance mapping in the aftermath of the Famine. It centers on Tomás, an Irish surveyor working for the British Ordnance Survey (as O’Farrell’s ancestor did). After a powerful experience at an ancient holy spring, he turns away from his official role and begins creating his own map, one that records the land through Irish language and local culture rather than through the colonial lens. From there, the story becomes a family story steeped in folklore as well as a broader portrait of post-Famine Ireland. It touches on loss, displacement, identity, and the resilience that has become synonymous with the Irish.
Despite all this, O’Farrell chose to omit one important word from her manuscript. “The word Ireland does not come up in the book, to make it more universal,” she said. And there is not a particular spot used for the setting. “The west coast (of Ireland) is full of peninsulas, but I didn’t pin a location. I wanted to ask the reader to consider the concept of maplessness.”
The author spent much time in Donegal, in Galway, and Cork, she said, where she found a sacred well known for curing madness. “Of course they tested it, and it had high levels of lithium,” she said, to crowd laughter. “Those druids were on to something.”
O’Farrell grew up and was educated in Scotland. “The Great Hunger was not in our curriculum at all,” she said, “or in Great Britain,” where her husband was raised. “He is a Londoner, and when he read an early draft (of LAND), he was just stunned. He said, ‘I had no idea it was this bad.’”
“Irish history is a long and complicated story,” she said to the sold-out theatre crowd. “People tell the story of Britain without mentioning Ireland. But the reverse cannot be said.”
When she was a child, the only stories her father would read to O’Farrell and her siblings were Irish myths. “The hermetic world of Irish myth forms the bedrock of my narrative, my understanding. The natural world has to be obeyed,” she said.
LAND was the Brigid’s Library Book Club pick of the month for July. Brigid’s Library is the book club made just for you, our Irish by Ancestry community.
Join us for the August read, PRESTIGE DRAMA by Séamas O’Reilly. This is O’Reilly’s debut, about a Hollywood production coming to Derry to make a drama about the Troubles. When the lead actress, Monica, disappears, every character reacts—to the production, the disappearance, and the city’s past. It is darkly comic but poignant, delving into the tension between those who want to leave the past behind and those who feel it has to be confronted, especially in a place still living with the legacy of conflict. It addresses who gets to shape the history we keep, and the awkwardness of turning real pain into “prestige” entertainment.
For invitations to our virtual book club meetings, author meet-and-greets, and early notification of book club picks, please sign up at www.brigidslibrary.com.
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