Ordnance Survey Ireland website additions

[Paddy Casey]

Ordnance Survey Ireland has added some material to its online shop. In addition to the 1842 OS maps, which the Clare Library has had online for ages together with numerous other old maps (see http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/maps/index.htm ), it now has the 25 inch OS maps (ca. 1915) in browseable and zoomable form. The latter, because they are very detailed and show the outlines of buildings, are sometimes useful in locating an ancestral house or its ruins or an old monument or graveyard.

There are also three sets of aerial photos from 1995, 2000 and 2005. Although high-flown (18,000 feet) they are of sufficiently high resolution to give a good overview of the landscape, roads, boreens, rivers, lakes and so forth. The resolution of the aerial photos is not sufficient to see the precise outlines of small houses, churches, cabhals, monuments, etc. Such small structures appear simply as blobs in the landscape but cemeteries can usually be identified if one knows roughly where they are located. However, the resolution is much better than that of the fuzzy satellite imagery which makes up most of the Google Earth coverage of Clare. There is also a set of aerial photos described as "hybrid" in which various structures, rivers, loughs, etc. are overlaid with diagrammatic outlines.

Go to http://ims0.osiemaps.ie/website/publicv ... 6,691299,8 for example and take it from there.

Paddy

P.S. As I mentioned in another thread last week, if you are looking for low-flown photos (e.g. to locate the ruins of an old family house) it's worth talking to the Army Air Corps Aerial Photography Section in Baldonnel, Co. Dublin (tel. +353 (1) 403 7520) to see what they have in their archives. Before calling, be ready with the geographical coordinates of the area you are interested in. P.