I am Austrian and have been working with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) in Vienna until I retired to Ireland in 2020.

I always liked maps and I got interested in OpenStreetMap at some point, recognizing the great potential of it. I also got interested in Irish placenames after moving to a Gaeltacht area on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. During the Covid lockdowns I started some mapping of Irish placenames, but at some point I gave up, as I did not really see an audience for it and found it rather time consuming.

Recently I learned that some people in our the community want to record the Irish names of farmers fields, which until now have been passed on by word only from one generation to the other. But this does not work anymore, and there is fear in the older generation that the names will be lost forever.

When I heard this I suggested to map the fields and their names and did some testing with OpenStreetMap, which worked very well and was much appreciated by members of the community and of CFLT ([Comharchumann Forbartha an Leith Triúigh] (https://www.cflt.ie/)).

I am not only mapping disconnected field areas, but instead I first add field boundaries as barriers with proper tagging (wall, hedge,…) and then build a relation documenting the land use and adding the field name to it. This way it is not only about displaying field names on the map but also adds useful details for navigation and avoiding unnatural and bad looking gaps between landuse areas.

To be able to extract all this data for producing specialized maps for the community using QGIS and also as backup, the features are tagged with a new tag key cflt:category