Dictionary of Irish Architects 1720 - 1940

Surveyor and 'rural designer', active in Ireland in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. William Greig was a Scotsman, who was probably brought over to Ireland circa 1806 by ALEXANDER TAYLOR ALEXANDER TAYLOR , director of the Irish Postal Roads Survey. He appears in Wilson's Dublin Directory for 1811 and 1813, with an address at 27 Dame Street in 1811 and at 21 Bolton Street in 1813. Later he was active as an estate surveyor in the north of Ireland, working from 1 Cornmarket, Belfast, in 1820 and from Omagh in 1822.(1) In 1819 he was in partnership with John Hill.(2) He was the author of Strictures on Road Police, Containing Views of the Present Systems, by which Roads are Made and Repaired, Together with Sketches of its Progress in Great Britain, from the Earliest to the Present Time (Dublin, 1818).(3) He also contributed several papers to the Irish Farmers' Journal under the signature of 'A Caledonian'.(4)



References



(1) Sarah Bendall, ed., Dictionary of Land Surveyors and Local Map-Makers of Great Britain and Ireland 1530-1850 (2nd edition, 1997), II, 215.
(2) J.H. Andrews, Plantation Acres (Ulster Historical Foundation, 1985), 188, n.110. This note seems to imply that Greig surveyed the estates of Gosford Castle, Co. Armagh.
(3) Andrews, op. cit., 220-221, nn.55,60; for other references to Greig in Andrews, see pp. 176,201.
(4) Strictures on Road Police, 119n (B.O'D.).


Author Title Date Details
Greig, William Strictures on Road Police, Containing Views of the Present Systems, by which Roads are Made and Repaired, Together with Sketches of its Progress in Great Britain &c. 1818 Dublin, 1818.