Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt

Survey became part of the ‘King’s Topographical Collection’, the title attributed by the British Library to the Topographical and Maritime Collections of King George III, a breathtaking array of some 50,000 atlases, maps, plans, prospects and views assembled through that monarch’s reign. Any reader of that public library can order sheets of this beautiful, nation-changing map to view in person. Anyone can spread out, across the Map Reading Room’s enormous tables, this window onto a lost landscape.
    The Military Survey of Scotland, in its final state, is a vast, gorgeous bird’s-eye view of mid-eighteenth-century Scotland. One of its surveyors, Hugh Debbieg, described the project as ‘the greatest work of this sort ever performed by British subjects’ and one of ‘the fine[st] Representations of the Country … in the World’. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath in the most north-westerly point of Scotland to the windswept coastlines and castles of Aberdeenshire in the east; across the glens of Angus, Fife’s bays, the forests of Perthshire, and the rugged mountains and lochs that punctuate the Trossachs and the Western Highlands; to the burgeoning cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the Lothians’ damp and fertile parks, the ancient stone circles in Ayrshire, and the deserted beaches of Galloway; right down to the gentlyundulating hills and plains of the Borders, the map-makers had drawn it all, in pen-and-ink and watercolour washes. An early witness of the survey noted that ‘the Mountains and Ground appear shaded in a capital style by the pencil of Mr Paul Sandby, subsequently so much celebrated as a Landscape Draughtsman. The outlines were drawn and other particulars were inserted under the care of General Watson by sundry assistants.’ And although the Military Survey of Scotland bore no legend to explain its ‘vocabulary of symbols’, the map was constructed in a language derived from contemporary Continental military surveying. Hedgerows were shown as lines of miniature trees. Enclosed fields were patches of green, sometimes containing scatterings of bushes. The roads over which Roy had trudged for eight years and six months were delineated by brown lines. Tilled land was represented by parallel hatching and rivers by turquoise streaks. Sand was denoted by stipple and moorland by infrequent patches of grass. Urban settlements consisted of loose grids and inhospitable mountains were signified by fierce strokes of brown-black paint, whose tone and direction indicated the shape and slope of the peaks. The Military Survey is a rare, delicate specimen of Enlightenment cartography that has been said to offer ‘a picture of Scotland on the eve of great changes’.
    Wonderful as it is, the Military Survey is not a uniformly accurate image of the landscape. It was the product of a small team of young and inexperienced map-makers, and the eight years and six months it took to complete was ridiculously swift for such an enormous, varied area of country. There are wild discrepancies in the levels of detail and completion between different sheets of the map, probably due to the changing practices of individual surveyors. Scotland’s islands were completely omitted, the finished maps bore no information about longitude or latitude, and they failed to indicate the direction of magnetic or true north. More importantly, the map-makers’ method of ‘traverse surveying’ resulted in the proliferation of errors over large distances, and a comparison of the Military Survey with a modern Ordnance Survey map of Scotland reveals serious divergences. The eastern end of Loch Leven, for example, is positioned on the Military Survey a good twenty miles south of its actual location. William Roy later justified his map’s inaccuracies by explaining that it was ‘carried on withinstruments of the common, or even inferior kind, and the sum annually allowed for it [was] inadequate to the execution of so great a design in the best