Our January monthly meeting will take place on Wednesday, 8th January at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library. Our speaker will be Professor Keith Lilley of the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen’s University, Belfast.

An historical geographer with particular research expertise in interpreting historic landscapes, maps and built environments, he is currently involved in OS200–Digitally Re-Mapping Ireland’s Ordnance Survey Heritage, an all-island (UK-RoI) research collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast, University of Limerick and the Royal Irish Academy. He will be discussing the following topic:

Ordnance Survey @ 200: Local Heritage of Global Importance

2024 marked the bicentenary of the beginning of the Ordnance Survey (OS) in Ireland. In this highly-illustrated talk, Professor Keith Lilley explores the local impacts OS surveying and mapping had two hundred years ago, as well as the surveyors’ enduring legacies in our landscapes today. The evidence for the OS’s mapping work is all around us as ‘local heritage’, often hidden and neglected. And yet this local heritage is of global importance, for the OS in Ireland in the 1820s-30s played an important international role in developing globally the science of earth measurement (‘geodesy’), and Armagh’s contribution in this was key. 

I hope you will be able to attend.