The 30th of November saw the 4-year anniversary of the #osmIRL_buildings project, an ambitious project of the Irish OSM community to map all the buildings on the island. Co. Kilkenny had been the first project to be finished in the task manager in April of 2020, and I thought that it was high time to look at it again.

Since I live in that county, I had noticed missing buildings once in a while being on the road or mapping other things remotely. Relatively new (summer 2022) aerial imagery had been made available by Esri World which wasn’t as clear as Bing, but more recent.

So I decided to make a private task in the task manager and update the whole county by myself. I like to have side quests to make it more interesting, so I decided to also look for unrecorded archaeological sites. The summer of 2022 had been very dry, so crop marks would be more visible on the Esri World imagery. I wanted a private task, so nobody would map any of the tiles, and I might miss something. I usually map the bulk of the other tasks anyway, but I did not want to take any chances. This was going to be the most thorough search for crop marks and other clues to archaeological sites Kilkenny had ever seen. Or so I believe.

All in all, it took me 11 days or 75.5 hours (average time per task multiplied by tasks), but I had excluded Kilkenny city, because I usually have an eye on that all the time.

Discovering sites sometimes slows me down, because I have to at least make a note or even write the report straight away.

Buildings mapped

Note: When we started the buildings project, the objective was only to get the buildings on the map, there was no objective to map building types which we have since decided to do. So, there was a lot of re-tagging involved. (Big thanks to jonnymccullagh and his JOSM colour scheme for buildings!)

building type	number 2023-11-26	number 2023-12-09
	85K	88 k
yes	46.6	25.6
house	26K	35.3K
semidetached_house	652	1.1K
detached	59	79
farm_auxiliary	2.5K	13.9K
barn	297	295
terrace	227	221
apartments	132	150
retail	399	465
commercial	344	398
industrial	383	424
school	177[^1]	194
church	113	114
hospital	56	55
public	42	51
library	1[^2]	1
ruins	649	763
demolished:building	141	699

[^1] These are not necessarily all still in use as schools, but I had mapped all school buildings previously for #WikiLovesMonuments. [^2] There is definitely more than one library in Co. Kilkenny!

It’s clear to see that there aren’t just buildings being built, but also demolished.

Highways and waterways

key	length in km 2023-11-26	length in km 2023-12-09
highway	6410	6607
waterway	1050	1061

Archaeological finds

In total, I sent 10 reports about 12 sites to the National Monuments Service. The first two have been confirmed; then I stopped receiving replies. I don’t know what that means. Almost all of them were circular crop marks, some were less circular and more towards rectangular. Before you ask in the comments what I think they are: I don’t know, neither will the record in the NMS tell you much more than “enclosure”, I would presume.

Here is a screenshot of Esri World of the two that have been confirmed: And the same two on Bing:

I took that inspiration and made another video about how to report potential monuments to the National Monuments Service. You will see more examples from that little project in the video: YouTube link

I was quite happy to use the excuse of mapping buildings to utilize the grid system of the task manager to systematically look for crop marks. Almost all the sites were in the Northern half of Kilkenny, which was quite frustrating, as I worked my way South. The last (quite controversial site), I discovered in the last 15 mins, I think. As you can see from the numbers, though, it paid off to use the grid search. Now I have to wait to hear back about the other ten sites…