Take a peek at what Limerick looked like 200 years ago!

Have you ever wondered what your home looked like two centuries ago?

Thanks to a new digital heritage resource created by researchers at the University of Limerick, Ordnance Survey (OS) maps from between 1824 and 1842 are now available online. 

The OS maps completed in this first ever large-scale survey of an entire country are regarded by cartographers as “amongst the finest ever produced”.

To mark the beginning of the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland 200 years ago, the ‘OS200—Digitally Re-Mapping Ireland’s Ordnance Survey Heritage’ project gathered historic OS maps and texts that were “held in disparate archives” to form a “freely accessible digital resource for academics and members of the public to use”.

The website enables you to find the map of your local area in the 1800s through filtering by County, Barony, Parish or Townland. For example, Limerick city can be seen in ‘County Limerick, Sheet 5’.

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UL worked with Queen's University Belfast and the Digital Repository of Ireland, amongst other partners, to create the digital archive. 

The project, which was launched in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, was co-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council. 

Dr Catherine Porter, from the School of History and Geography in UL, led the UL team.

She explained that the main challenge of this project was “the sheer volume of information, and varied state of materials”. 

“Many of the OS records were not easily accessible or searchable and housed in different locations, so it was difficult to build a complete picture of what happened during the first survey in the early nineteenth century,” she added. 

Dr Porter proudly stated that the project provided them with “the opportunity to collate the materials together and develop a new OS archive for the island.”

A press statement from the University of Limerick explained that “by reconnecting digitally, the OS maps, memoirs, correspondence, drawings, and books of place names into a new online resource, the project aims to open up the histories to wider audiences, enabling a richer and deeper engagement with and understanding of the OS operations in Ireland two centuries ago”.