Ancient Web: The Ireland Story Kept 1998 History and Fifty-Four Maps Online

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

One of the most useful things an old historical website can do is admit when its maps stopped being current.

Visit The Ireland Story.

Wesley Johnston's site says it began operating in March 1998 and has not been updated since 2001. Johnston names Patrick Abbot as the author of most of its main history section. Rather than disguise its age, the homepage warns readers that parts of the material may be out of date. That makes the site unusually clear about the boundary between its enduring history pages and the contemporary information it once offered.

The history directory links accounts of prehistoric and Celtic Ireland, the Norman arrival, the Great Famine, the Troubles, and the Omagh bombing of August 1998. Some material is expansive; other entries are concise reference chapters.

An atlas made for small files and slow connections

The site's map index lists 54 maps, made between the late 1990s and 2001. It includes Dublin and Belfast street maps, counties, population density, physical geography, electoral boundaries, and the changing religious composition of communities. Each entry supplies a brief description, often a scale and a file size measured in kilobytes.

Some historical maps go back to Celtic Ireland in 100 AD, Viking activity in the ninth century, and the Norman presence around 1300. Others put nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures directly into geography: famine severity in 1847, population decline from 1841 to 1851, and Northern Ireland election results.

A particularly revealing collection charts the changing distribution of religious groups using 1861 and 1991 census information, while other maps illustrate political violence in several periods of the Troubles. These are sensitive subjects, and the diagrams reflect the authors' methods and the data available when the pages were made. They should not be confused with current electoral or demographic reference material.

The Famine section is organized as a miniature book: agriculture, potatoes, economics, blight, relief, Black '47, emigration, and demographic consequences each receive a place in the sequence.

Johnston explicitly allows unmodified maps to be reused on non-profit websites under stated conditions. That spirit of practical sharing belongs to an earlier, quieter Web: an amateur publisher could create a small historical atlas and leave it available for anyone curious enough to follow the links.

Browse the preserved Ireland map index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.