These are fascinating letters which draw the reader deep into the worlds of pre-Famine Donegal and into the mind and craft of a young, energetic, resourceful fieldworker - John O'Donovan - soon to become one of the greatest if not the greatest Irish language scholar of the 19th century. We catch wonderful glimpses of O'Donovan (and his assistant O'Connor) traipsing up to a dozen miles a day, chased by bulls, umbrellas shattered by storms, protecting their precious books and maps above their own bodies as they shelter under bushes and rocks in the teeming rain, and suffering from the irregularities of diet and the dampness of beds in loud country public houses.
The Ordnance Survey Letters Donegal tell part of the epic story of O'Donovan's striding across Ireland from north to south between 1834 and 1843. In his own words, he now had "a large field to work on", as he moved from parish to parish to become Ireland's greatest historical topographer and leave his stamp on both Irish place names and the Irish psyche. He writes well at speed and under very poor conditions to provide often powerful images of Donegal's people and landscapes. And when he grows tired of the serious, tedious business of checking the forms of his names, he soars off into engaging reflections on the meaning of myths and legends, the mutability of human affairs and the nature of oral tradition. Overall, the letters reveal the 29-year-old, Kilkenny-born O'Donovan as witty, insightful, vigorous, scholarly, sceptical.
The masterful O'Donovan is revealed as he advises his supervisor Thomas Larcom as to the forms the Irish place names should take on the O.S. six-inch maps. As Brian Friel puts it in the preface "he pursued, scrutinised and standardised" and pinned down these Donegal names, giving them a pedigree and a permanence. Statements like "I shall now proceed to decide, to settle the names of Kilmacrenan barony" reveal the power being exercised by one man over a whole landscape. Hence we understand more fully the force of O'Donovan's metaphorical use of "attack" and "conquest" to describe his vision of the work he was carrying out in Tir Chonaill. His involvement in the active process of map production is revealed by other queries: "Are we keeping pace with the engravers?"
One of the most revealing insights gained from O'Donovan's letters relates to the range of field strategies he used to determine the best forms for each place name. He always seeks to match the field evidence with the widest range of relevant documentary sources. His command of the literature - including his great knowledge of Irish poetry - is astonishing, as is his memory for identifying the precise sources needed from the Dublin Office and the libraries of the RDS and the RIA for documents as far apart as the Annals and the Inquisitions. He is constantly testing local pronunciations as he seeks out the most gifted local historians or intelligent old fishermen who are often given a glass of the hard stuff to get them to open up to O'Donovan's promptings. And, as befits a great topographer, he tramps the fields, hills, roads and river valleys, checking the putative meaning of the names against their specific geographical situations. The ancient lode of genealogy he also mines to both contextualise the place names and to further develop his own knowledge of family names and kin group histories. And in the myths and legends, he seeks the central truths that lie embedded in these fables. The vigorous and rigorous scholar is also highlighted as he enters into a dialogue (or more usually a disagreement) with a whole battalion of Irish scholars: Lanigan, Colgan (whom he greatly admired), MacFirbis, Petrie, Archdall ("I am sure he is wrong") and Vallancey, whom O'Donovan always expected to be wrong. In the end he admits of no authority on Irish antiquities except Keating and Moses which leaves the field very much to Geoffrey Keating and himself.
Issues of memory, inscription and authority are therefore central to an evaluation of O'Donovan's O.S. work. He is acutely aware of standardising a place name legacy that is mobile and unfixed in both the Irish linguistic and oral tradition. O'Donovan was document-reliant but was not document-bound. He is highly critical of the oral tradition, "that unsafe historian with cloudy memory and muddy brains". Yet when he tests the genealogical memory against the Annals he does not find it wanting. And O'Donovan is clearly sensitive to what he calls "constant tradition" - for tradition, though it confuses and conflates things, "always retains some glimmer of truth". O'Donovan is, therefore, a skilful mediator between the official and the oral.
O'Donovan is also an able ethnographer - recording the habits and attitudes of many distinctive Donegal localities from Fanad and Tory Island, on to the Lagan and the Rosses. For example, social immobility is seen to be the dominant trait in the character of the Glencolumbkille people; "their comfortless condition and awe of religion renders them moral". Social conditions in these pre-Famine days are also noted. The women stocking-makers on their way to the fair of Dunglow "bore deep graven on their visages the effects of poverty and smoke", while the inhabitants of Doe "may now enjoy peace, yet they appear as miserable" to O'Donovan as in the time of MacSweeny circa 1600.
He anticipates the Famine, noting that - given the over-dependence on the potato - "the present state of things must end in general destruction". He is also astute about the forces shaping the decline of the Irish language. In the Irish-speaking parish of Clonmany, cut off by distance and mountains "from the more civilised and less civil inhabitants of the lower countryside", he notes that "the men only, who go to the markets and fairs, speak a little English, the women and children speak Irish only". In contrast, he associates the loss of traditions around Letterkenny town with the loss of the Irish language.
Behind all the exploration of mythic, documentary, linguistic and field evidence, there is a careful, diligent, imaginative scholar: "Though my letters appear as wild as the mountains in which they were written, still do I feel myself very sober in thought and exceedingly in love with truth even to the prejudice of all national feelings." And apart from serving the objectives of the Ordnance Survey, he had other goals: "I am anxious to collect all the rhymes and rags of history . . . that they may be hereafter digested and arranged in proper order." In the end, his emotional and ideological position is like that of his hero Keating - he is of the Irish/ Gaelic tradition. This is evidenced by many of his passionate responses to key Gaelic sites across Donegal. "Taking off my hat, I salute him as MacSweyne mac Doe, Lord of Tua Tory" is how he greets the dispossessed but aristocratic MacSweeney Doe and the latter's learned response is to recite his own genealogy like a rosary.
O'Donovan had his blind spots, too. His terms of reference were to research the ancient forms of place names with the objective of establishing an approved spelling for each name. Nevertheless, in areas like Upper Fahan and Raphoe where the "Albany" or "rich Presbyterians" had settled, O'Donovan deemed it useless to inquire into their understanding of the meaning of names and places - "the natives are all Scottified and never talk of old times". But they surely had their own place-memories and traditions written into the landscape.
O'Donovan's scholarly interests and inclinations were focused on Gaelic and preNorman Ireland - later settler memories and icons get short shrift. O'Donovan also seems to make the assumption that the forms of all Irish place names must derive from Irish language roots only. He, like many other scholars after him, has clearly underestimated the Norse-Scandinavian contribution to Donegal and Irish place names. For example, it is doubtful if his standardising of the place names of Tory Island (which he could not visit because of storms) could now be fully sustained. We may need to take a fresh look at the greater hybridity of our place name heritage.
After 12 weeks of hard work and hard writing in Donegal in the late autumn of 1835, O'Donovan tires towards the end. He would like to be back in his "former seat of bliss" (Dublin). A fortnight earlier he had written that a week in Pettigoe and a week in Ballyshannon "would finish this dull country". Clearly Donegal was and is never dull and neither are O' Donovan's engaging letters from that county.
As editor Michael Herity points out in his very helpful introduction, the Donegal O.S. Letters exist as part of a 29-county set (excluding Antrim, Cork and Tyrone), which constitutes one of the great manuscript collections of the Royal Irish Academy. It is to be hoped that the publication of the O.S. Letters for all the counties will be achieved. In such a venture, it would be very helpful if the index would refer not only to the MSS pages but also to the pages of the book itself.
Willie Smyth is Professor of Geography at UCC. His book Letting the Documents of Conquest Speak: A Cultural Geography of Colonial Ireland will be published next year.