In Land, map-making is stripped of scientific neutrality and recast as an instrument of colonial subjugation. The novel argues that the British Ordnance Survey’s revision of Irish maps in the 19th century was a violent campaign to erase an indigenous reality and impose an imperial one. Through the work of its protagonist, the surveyor and translator Tomás, the narrative demonstrates how anglicizing Gaelic place names and redrawing boundaries to reflect colonial control effectively overwrites centuries of history and memory. Yet O’Farrell also explores how this very tool of oppression can be subverted, as Tomás ultimately rejects the colonial project to create a new kind of map rooted in resistance, honor, and historical truth.

The novel initially establishes the British mapping project as an exercise in linguistic and historical simplification. Employed by the British colonialists, Tomás’s primary value lies in his ability to translate the land for them. He parses complex, polysyllabic Gaelic place names, which often contain stories of local events, folklore, or natural features, and reduces them to English equivalents like “Bluff’s Cross” and “Yellowcove,” which prove more manageable for the colonial officers to read. This process is more than translation; it’s a form of erasure that severs the deep, historical connection between the people and the names they use for their own landscape. By overwriting the native toponymy, the British army imposes a foreign, simplified grid onto a land rich with ancestral meaning, rendering its indigenous history illegible to the new rulers and, eventually, to its own people.

While participating in this colonial project, Tomás simultaneously engages in a private act of cartographic resistance. A significant part of his task is to update maps to reflect the devastation of the Great Famine, erasing the hundreds of tenant cottages and entire villages that have been emptied and dismantled. The British officers prefer to ignore this history, but Tomás is determined that his maps “will bear an account of what happened, what was lost” (6). This quiet vow positions him as a conflicted figure: a collaborator who aids the colonial project but also a secret archivist who uses its tools to preserve the very trauma his employers wish to forget. His work becomes a palimpsest where the official, sanitized version of the landscape barely conceals the ghost-like presence of a decimated population.

This internal conflict culminates in a complete rejection of the colonial endeavor after Tomás’s transformative experience at a sacred well. He comes to see the official maps as nothing more than “enemy tools” and begins creating his own, radically different chart. This new map is an act of deep cultural reclamation. Written in Gaelic, it prioritizes sites of native historical and spiritual significance, such as “Hill Fort,” “dolmen,” and “evicted village,” over the Anglicized names and landlord boundaries of the British survey. When Father Joseph, a figure of the assimilated church, views this new creation, he’s bewildered, declaring it to be in the “wrong language.” His reaction emphasizes the success of the colonial mindset, which has rendered the land’s own native tongue alien. For Tomás, however, this “wrong” language is the only one that can tell the truth, transforming cartography from a tool of erasure into an act of deep honor and cultural survival.