I finally got in contact with the person responsible for the Westmeath Field Names Recording Project (Aengus Finnegan) last week. I asked him whether it would be possible to use the data collected by them and to add them to OSM and he saw no problem saying they were published on logainm under Creative Commons license. So I have started transfering the data, but it is slow going, because I don’t have a list of townlands covered by the project, they don’t have one on the website. Also, they didn’t mark the fields as areas, but just with markers, so it is tricky to know where one field ends and the next one starts.

I believe they used the Ordnance Survey 25’’ map which was finished/ published in 1913. Of course, field boundaries have changed since then, i.e. fields have been merged into bigger ones.

But with all the complaining, it is great to have them available for OSM!