Professor Anngret Simms, head of UCD's geography department, is probably better known to the public for her work with the Royal Irish Academy on the Historic Towns Atlas project. Anne Byrne reports

Monks illuminated manuscripts and built a round tower. Normans added a castle and walls. More recently, women were expelled from the town, as whores, and citizens were fined for selling eggs before 8 a.m.

Today, the boundaries of the early Christian enclosure at Kells, Co Meath, survive in its curving streets, although most visitors will see only the carved stone crosses and the round tower. The streets were built by Anglo-Normans, who gave the town a charter, while the street names recall an earlier past - John Street remembering the St John's Hospitallers, and Canon Street harking back to the Augustinians.

Kells is the favourite town of Professor Anngret Simms despite the growing sprawl of suburban houses. She is responsible for the historic atlas of the town that provides visitors with a rich sense of an older Kells surviving within the new. "There is continuity within discontinuity," she says.

As she talks, Simms spills a jumble of books and historic atlases (Kells, Kilkenny, Wroclaw in Poland . . .) on to the large shining table in the very formal Royal Irish Academy while handing EL a bag of chocolate-covered gingerbread.

She has spent a large portion of her life in Ireland but she speaks English with a pronounced German accent, and her sentences often contain strangely formal textbook constructions. "I've always felt at home here. I came here with a very open heart. But, for me, it's very often a shock when I am asked by a shopkeeper how long my holidays will last. I would dearly love to be able to drop the accent, not to be seen as a blow-in." Born in Rostock in eastern Germany, her family moved, at the end of the second World War, from the Soviet-occupied zone to West Germany. She became an undergraduate at Cologne University and wanted to come to Ireland to study in QUB. "But they were only interested in men, so I had to meet my Irishman in Glasgow (she is married to David Simms, now professor of mathematics in TCD)," she says wryly.

They moved to Dublin and Simms worked in a part-time position in UCD's department of geography for 15 years. She has three sons. "All three of them said they didn't want to become academics because it's far too much work. Now, all three have PhDs and are following in their parent's footsteps. I'm quite pleased," she says.

Anngret Simms became a college lecturer, a senior lecturer, then associate professor and head of the geography department. There are 450 students in the department, of whom 406 are undergraduates and 23 are modular students.

"The modular option is very successful. Mainly mature students come to the college in the evening. The students are much more responsive as it's what they want to do. There are nine full-time staff and two part-time staff in the department so it's not a strong resource base."

Somewhat ironically, it's her work with the Royal Irish Academy that means she is better known to the public than many academics. The RIA, which was founded in 1785 to promote the study of "science, polite literature and antiquities", is a very exclusive club, with a membership of just over 300 people, mostly men. Simms says: "I'm surprised people say it's an ivory tower. The Historic Towns Atlas brings us together with people outside the universities - expert local historians and local people interested in their towns." The Irish atlas series, which has published dossiers on 10 towns since its inception in 1986, is part of a much larger European project of national historic towns atlases, established in 1955 by the International Commission for the History of Towns, in "the spirit of reconciliation in the aftermath of the devastating destruction of European towns in the second World War." Simms first came in contact with the project when she was a Humboldt fellow in Bonn, in 1978-80.

She visited the Institute for Comparative Urban History in Munich, where the German towns atlas is produced. It boasts two full-time cartographers, three full-time paid editorial staff, and a reference library for urban history. She also visited the Austrian towns atlas office in Vienna, where she met three full-time editors and three cartographers.

Back in Ireland, she found a group of people who agreed to work as honorary editors. The RIA was persuaded to act as publisher and to provide the salary for one full-time cartographical editor. None of the contributors are paid.

"The RIA adopted us. The Irish atlases are produced on a shoestring, by people who are pleased to be part of an international scheme," says Simms.

Each atlas is published separately as a folder comprising maps, an essay explaining the historical development of the town, and body of classified topographical information. "We have no topographical dictionary. The nearest is the Lewis dictionary of the 1830s but it's not at the level of detail that other countries have. The atlases record each building in a town and its history." For instance, in Kilkenny, we find our ancestors were busy making ropes, coaches, iron and nails, and brogues, or working in distilleries, mills and inns.

Simms hopes the atlases will go some way towards informing planners and stopping inappropriate development. Unfortunately, the atlas of Kilkenny was published in 2000, too late to be used as a weapon against inappropriate development. There is no excuse now for planners not to inform themselves, she says.

"We chose the towns from the most representative phases of urban history: Kildare, Kells and Downpatrick are of early monastic origin, Carrickfergus and Athlone were medieval plantation towns, Bandon was a plantation town from the early modern period, Maynooth was a landlord town, Bray a Victorian Spa and Kilkenny a medieval town." Simms says there is a perception that Irish towns are not really Irish as most were founded by foreigners - Vikings, Normans and Anglo-Normans. "If you bought an Irish postcard, even five years ago, it was likely to be of a rural scene. In the past five years, postcards with sights from towns have begun to be sold. I think Irish people have begun to identify with their towns," she says.

More atlases are in the offing and Simms stresses that they are very much a team effort. Among others, she pays tribute to Mary Davis, the first cartographical editor, and Sara Gearty, her successor.

Simms love of landscape was instilled in her by her grandfather, who published local history. Today, in Ireland, three times as many students take geography as history at Leaving Certificate. The cynical would attribute this to points pressure, with geography often seen as easy option.

However, Simms chooses to ascribe it to the growing interest in the environment among students.

The series of historic atlases (over the years, seminars have been run for second-level teachers showing how the maps might be used as teaching tools) may well inspire even more students to consider geography as a serious academic option.

For further information on the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, see the project website at www.ria.ie/IHTAtlas.html