Show HN: Townlands of Ireland – customised map posters
townlandsofireland.com
townlandsofireland.com
I recently launched this poster design and customisation project. It's built entirely from home with just my wife and I working on it.
The idea came from us realising our official address might have the wrong townland. Townlands being the smallest official land division in the country, with fairly ancient origins.
Digging into official maps, old maps and ongoing efforts to digitally map and research the original underlying Irish language names of the now mostly anglicised place names, was a very fun rabbit hole to dive into.
I also realised I'd never seen a map of Ireland composed of just the townland boundaries: of which there are an atonishing (to me anyway) 61,112, give or take.
A lot of people in Ireland, particularly in the countryside, are quite passionate about their townland/s. They don't carry any social complexities like teams or flags, but they do offer colour and meaning in a sort of linguistic interface to the land and its occupants. For example, the meaningless sounding townland Brockra is derived from the Irish An Bhrocraigh, or the place of badgers.
By combinging data from OpenStreepMap, Loganim[0], townlands[1] and other sources, we built a dataset which we would use as the foundation for a poster design. We designed the poster and built the customisation engine in parallel, letting one influence the other.
We built the whole thing in 3 weeks including website, a preview request and approval system, email and print API integration. This wouldn't have been possible without AI development tools, Claude code in this case.
The Python-based poster builder modifies SVG template layers to a spec file, a style file and a place name sidecar file. It uses Inkscape headless to outline text and CairoSVG for rasterization. This runs on an old linux PC at home, the website is built with caard and the e-commerce stack is Cloudfare worker, Stripe and Supabase.
Sample posters and previews of custom posters are available on the website. Hope it's of interest to some!