Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Fiction comes from what you don’t know’

Every family has its myths. In mine we were told that one of our antecedents had worked on the first maps of Ireland, and as a child I pictured a solitary figure in an unspecified period dress – perhaps a tailcoat and cravat – striding about fields and mountains, pen in hand, wondering how one person could map a whole country as Donegal or Galway rolled by.

After a relative died my parents were sent family items: a hand-drawn map no larger than a hardback, rendered in coloured inks, and an ancient photograph of a man seated in a doorway with a child on his knee. No tailcoats or cravats appeared; the man wore a worn jacket and a low-brimmed hat.

With a magnifying glass I found, in the top left corner of the map inside a tiny medallion, a tableau: a red-jacketed soldier leaning into a theodolite and, behind him holding a measuring chain, the very man from the photograph.

Ireland, Donegal, Galway

maggie o'farrell, fiction, family myths, irish maps, antique map, archival photograph, theodolite, measuring chain, donegal, galway