Maps have an eternal fascination for many people and few are more intriguing than old maps of Dublin, writes Hugh Oram.
It's not just the cartographic and illustrative excellence that makes them so interesting, but the way in which they show the city expanding over the years. After all, it's only two centuries since Dublin ended at St Stephen's Green on the southside and Bolton Street on the northside and Donnybrook, Drumcondra, Fairview and Glasnevin were all open country.
The first recognisable map of Dublin, still frequently reproduced, was published by John Speed in 1610. Little is known about Speed, except that he was born in Cheshire, spent most of his life in London and was father to 12 sons and six daughters. He began as a tailor but switched to map-making. His highly ornamented and stylised "Dubline" map was part of an exercise called "The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine".
This was still medieval Dublin, stretching from Trinity College up to St James's Gate. Much of Speed's information came from other sources, some of which have never been identified. Speed's map-making deficiencies were offset by his engraving and lettering.
This map and the other maps of Dublin done before the Ordnance Survey have a home in the Glucksman map library in Trinity College, Dublin, which is the only dedicated map library in Ireland. However, there are other significant map collections in such places as the National Archive, the National Library of Ireland and UCD. Lewis Glucksman, benefactor to Trinity, the University of Limerick and most recently, University College, Cork, is a retired New York banker who lives near Cobh, Co Cork and has a particular interest in early maps. His Irish-American wife Loretta chairs the America-Ireland Fund.
After Speed came Bernard de Gomme, with his 1673 map of Dublin. It showed Lazy Hill, close to the route of the present day Pearse Street, then all open country. What is now D'Olier Street and Burgh Quay remained to be reclaimed from the sea. One city centre thoroughfare was well named in de Gomme's map: Dirty Lane in Temple Bar.
The next significant cartographer of Dublin was Charles Brooking, whose map was published in 1728. This was an "upside down" map of the city, with the south at the top, which had a magnificent panorama of Dublin and all its churches. The spaces between the streets were shaded in, giving no detail, though the streets were finely delineated. This map shows Bolton Street at the very northern edge of the city.
Paul Ferguson, the Trinity mapping librarian, who showed me these and other mapping treasures, hugely detailed maps of many major European cities were produced around this time. Nothing similar was ever produced for Dublin, probably because its medieval heart was so small.
But Dublin made up for this deficiency with John Rocque's 1756 map of Dublin. This is not just fantastic, but spectacular, in Paul Ferguson's opinion. Rocque was of French Huguenot extraction, had made his career in London and had also mapped Paris and Rome. He came to Dublin late in his career, not just to make his map of Dublin but to map the estates of the Earl of Kildare.
Rocque was as much a businessman as a map-maker and he set up shop at Bachelors Walk to sell copies of his Dublin map, in which every house and garden was included. He must have gone behind every house to get the details of the garden and in nearly every case, archaeologists have verified his accuracy.
He calculated that Dublin had 12,060 dwelling houses with a population of 96,480, which was probably an under-estimate. But Dublin was still very small. The street that led from St Stephen's Green was almost entirely devoid of houses and was known simply as "the road to Donnybrook", running through open countryside. It is now Leeson Street. As late as 1780, only two sides to Merrion Square had been built, while in 1798, what is now Haddington Road was still Watery Lane.
One fascinating aspect of these early maps is that often they showed features that were planned but never built. At the end of the 18th century, the Royal Circle was planned just off the North Circular Road, Dublin's answer to the Crescent in Bath. It was never built, but showed up on maps for the next 20 or 30 years, getting more ghostly each time. In an 1820 map, the faint outline of the Royal Circle that never was can still be seen.
Map-making changed dramatically with the arrival in 1824 of the Ordnance Survey, equipped with vast manpower resources. Within little more than 20 years, its men had finished their basic mapping of Ireland.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inches-to-the-mile map of Dublin in 1843, its first on this scale, showed Rathmines and Rathgar just beginning to take off as two of Dublin's new residential districts. The 1876 OS map showed the start of the city's sprawl into suburbia.
But even an OS map of Dublin published as late as 1947 showed a city still compact by today's standards. In south-west Dublin, the countryside began at Drimnagh, while what is now the Naas Road area and the infamous Red Cow roundabout was still farmland.
On the north of the city, the countryside began just beyond Drumcondra and Marino. Tallaght was a delightful little country village.
These old maps are also a priceless barometer of social change, as Dublin changed from village to town to capital city. Now the greater Dublin area is home to half the population of the State and today the suburbs of Dublin extend into counties Wicklow, Kildare and Meath.
Speed would have been astonished by the speed of change over the past 20 years.