Heritage Week is an annual number of days (it’s longer than a week by now) taking place in August in Ireland. There is a wide array of events including talks, workshops, guided walks etc all around built and natural heritage. This year’s topic was “Living Heritage”.

Recording Milk Churn Stands

Early on in my effort to map milk churn stands in Ireland, I thought that it was not sustainable for me to travel around the country and look for the needle in the haystack, when the locals knew where all the milk churn stands were. So I decided to give a talk which would hopefully raise awareness about the endless possibilities OpenData, OpenSource and OpenStreetMap offers. It was supposed to be a workshop, but I had a funny feeling that the demographic of the audience would turn it into a talk. It actually turned out to be the first event on the Heritage Week website. The Minister for Heritage (, Housing & Electoral Reford) who I happen to be friends with offered to attend, and of course I thought that would be a great opportunity to promote OSM.

The venue was a library in a rural town which used to have a creamery, because I thought it might attract people who remembered the time when milk churn stands (aka creamery stands) were still in use. Once the librarians heard that the minister was attending, they got a bit excited and let the regional library manager know. The big day arrived on August 16th, and he did attend. I had brought the OSM Ireland pull-up poster for the photo op, and also for branding awareness reasons. - So many people still don’t know about OSM, even though everyone by now must have been exposed to it one way or another.

I talked about OpenData, OpenSource, Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap.

Seven or nine people attended, including the special guest. Judging from the age group, none of them will become a mapper, but we had a good chat afterwards where they could share their memories. The librarians also had had the idea some weeks ago to create a survey form for milk churn stands. We will have to see whether that will yield anything.

Minister Noonan was also kind enough to post about the event on his ministerial Facebook page. I keep telling him about OSM and showing him examples, so maybe it will raise awareness in the long run.

Heritage Mapping Clinic

A bit more short notice, I had the idea to offer a walk-in mapping “clinic” where people could turn up with their local knowledge about placenames and milk churn stands. As said before, the people with the knowledge are of an age where they are not able to or not willing to learn how to map. We thought that this kind of service would overcome that obstacle. One person turned up who seemingly was expecting some sort of training, but hadn’t brought a laptop and didn’t talk to us for the first hour. So we just happily mapped our own stuff. He did end up providing some field names and local lore.

We decided to keep offering that “service” as part of our monthly Kilkenny History Mappers meet ups. Maybe it takes time for word to spread. And we’re not sitting around waiting for people to turn up at these meet ups, as you can imagine. There is always something to map.