In the early years of the nineteenth century, such was Napoleon’s strength that the British became convinced that they were next on his hit list. Terrified of a Napoleonic invasion, the British racked their brains for alternative raw materials to keep their army strong. At the forefront of this quest was a desire to strengthen their navy, to protect the seas from the much-feared French.
In 1808 they thought they had found the raw material to rescue them: hemp from the bogs of Ireland. It was suggested that hemp from the Irish bogs would support the mass production of sailcloth for British navy vessels. So the largest ever survey of Irish land was commissioned in order to assess the viability of the project – and the Bog Commission was born.
Fast-forward almost two hundred years later and the results of the Bog Commission are found at auction in Dublin. A tip off is passed to University College Dublin, and soon the fifty maps are on their way to Belfield and into the hands of Dr Arnold Horner.
Dr Horner from the UCD School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy is working to reproduce the maps that the commission submitted to the British crown all those years ago. By adjusting the scale of the maps, reprinting them and transferring them to CD, Dr Horner hopes to make new and exciting discoveries about the Ireland of the early nineteenth century.
“The maps themselves are of a very high standard”, he says. “They show us the extent to which Ireland was covered in bog at the time, but they also mapped in roads, towns and churches so they give us a fascinating look at what Ireland was like back then. It is the social dimension to the maps that make them very interesting”.
In 1809, the young Richard Griffith and Richard Lovell were among the team of engineers who travelled to Ireland to survey its bogs. The commission would last four years and would ultimately cover one-tenth of the entire island. The study focused on the midlands, north Munster and large parts of Connaught. Although the team of engineers had hoped to travel further north and into Ulster before the commission was re-called to Britain and the plans to use Irish hemp to expand the British navy were cancelled.
Dr Arnold Horner during fieldwork in the bogs of County Wicklow, Ireland.
By 1814, twenty years before the first Irish Ordinance Survey map was created, the Bog Commission had compiled four reports and fifty maps for presentation to the British parliament. So the Bog Commission maps are effectively the earliest maps of Ireland ever created. They offer unique insight into pre-famine Ireland because thirty years later the famine would devastate Ireland, forever changing its landscape and demographics.
When the Napoleonic threat had eased, the commission was closed down and its work was locked away into the annals of British history. And although the work of the commission is known, it has suffered neglect from academic interests. But no more. With the assistance of the Heritage Council, Horner has been able to re-publish the maps produced by the great Alexander Nimmo, who later made his name as a road-builder. Nimmo’s maps cover 197,000 acres of Co. Kerry, mostly around the Kenmare area.
According to Dr Horner, the maps show Kerry as it was before the development of modern towns and villages. Yet, the map also shows a county thickly populated on the better land and details over nine hundred buildings, most of which are long gone.
Dr Horner has managed to reproduce other maps that covered the area surrounding the Wicklow Mountains. Originally produced by Richard Griffith, the maps show the county just a decade after the 1798 Rebellion and just after the military road and its associated barracks had been completed. These maps, says Horner, allow us the first detailed look at how Irish landscape and settlement has changed over the past two hundred years.
Indeed, Ireland is only just returning to its pre-famine population and the Ireland surveyed by the Bog Commission shows a densely populated island. In his report of 1814, John Longfield made the following observations about Co. Roscommon:
“The population of the county of Roscommon (although generally considered as a grazing county) is exceedingly great, so much so, that every little island or peninsula in the bogs contains more than an ordinary proportion of inhabitants; as an instance of which, I shall mention one island near Lough Glynn of 107 acres, called Cloonborny, that contains no less than 21 families, being little more than five acres to each house, and for which they pay a rent of not less than 40 shillings per acre. It is therefore not to be wondered at, that multitudes of those poor peasants emigrate annually to England…I never met men who would go farther or labour harder for a shilling than Connaught men”.
According to Dr Horner, it is this sort of social commentary, included in the commission’s reports, that makes the topic so fascinating.
In an age where the issue of binge drinking is a hot topic, it is interesting to recall some of Longfield’s comments made in 1814 in relation to illicit distillation of alcohol in Roscommon,
“[Illicit distillation] is now a disgrace to the country in general, and a serious loss to those fair dealers who are not concerned in it…What the full extent of this trade amounts to, or how far the revenue of Ireland is injured by it, I am not prepared to say; but this much, I verily believe, that in the County of Roscommon, nay, I might say in the whole province of Connauaght, there is not one gallon of licensed spirits in every hundred gallons of its consumption”.
Ultimately, the Irish bogs were never drained to mass-produce hemp for sail cloth for British navy vessels to fight off Napoleon. The threat posed by the French leader eased and the British soon forgot about the Irish bogs. Indeed, as noted by Dr Horner, it was a plan that was never really fully thought out.
“The political aspect to the Bog Commission was very surprising”, he says. “The British were so worried about Napoleon that they were looking for anything that might help supplies. It was hysteria similar to the recent pre-Iraq war hysteria, where people were talking about weapons of mass destruction. It was a madcap scheme and there were never any tests conducted to see whether it would even work”.
From the British point of view, the Bog Commission may have been fruitless, but they captured a fascinating view of the physical and social development of Ireland two hundred years ago.
Details of the re-published bogs maps can be found at - www.glenmaps.com