Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt Page A

manner’. It was, Roy admitted, ‘rather to be considered as a magnificent military sketch, than a very accurate map of a country’.
    A question that troubles map historians to this day is what exactly the Military Survey was for. It began as one element of the post-Culloden project of Highland reform, after the soldiers charged with rooting out rebels from the deepest recesses of the Highlands had keenly felt the lack of a good map of that region. A small-scale chart of Highland Scotland was also useful to the engineers involved in the extension of roads and to officers tasked with the transportation of heavy artillery and troops from the Lowlands up to forts and barracks at places like Fort Augustus or Inversnaid. But there is no evidence that the Military Survey was ever actually employed. Locked away in libraries for half a century after its completion, the maps were only temporarily excavated from a dusty basement by a road surveyor when an Act of Parliament in 1803 decreed the building of more highways and bridges in Scotland. The Military Survey was never published, and it has only been exposed to a mass audience in exhibition spaces in the last century.
    Moreover, none of these practical motives for making the map explain why in 1752 William Roy and his surveyors turned their attention to Lowland Scotland. That the project benefited from private funding implies that it was attractive to the nobility of Enlightenment Scotland, and this is supported by the fact that William Roy and David Watson produced a unique hand-painted presentation copy of the Military Survey’s map of the area around Arniston especially for the Dundases. The sculpted geometry of Arniston’s avenues and paths imprints a neat geometric cluster at the centre of this map and a scribbled note on the reverse explains that the survey was ‘drawn by Roy, and given by him to Lord President Dundas, sometime about the year 1755. It is an Excerpt from the Survey of Scotland executed at that Time by the General & other Officers under the Direction of General David Watson.’ Scotland’s noblemen may have seen in the Military Survey a response to heated criticisms of the poor and fragmentary state of that nation’s maps, such as those voiced by the surveyor George Mark back in the 1720s. Furthermore,the purchase, sponsorship or making of maps was likely to have been a badge of Enlightenment. In mapping Scotland, the King’s engineers may have considered themselves vitally differentiated from ‘barbarian’ Highlanders who had no choice but to be mapped (pointedly ignoring the fact that the Jacobites were extremely cartographically literate – the exiled Stuart court in France had made a point of collecting maps of Scotland). There is also something enduringly powerful in an image of a complete map of a nation. Men like Dundas considered that Scotland’s political disunity weakened the resistance it posed to England’s ‘unsufferable tyranny’ in the Anglo-Scottish Union. A picture of a unified nation was a picture of a strong Scotland and this idea was so potent that the adventure-writer Robert Louis Stevenson later proclaimed that ‘Scotland has no unity except on the map ’.
    The Enlightenment raised the bar for cartography higher than it had ever been before. But as the Military Survey’s example showed, map-makers’ attempts to attain the ideal of perfect measurement, a one-to-one replication of the physical world, could not take place overnight. The history of cartography ’s progress is a story of trial and error in which every inaccuracy, every shortcoming, every failure of expectations forms a stepping stone on the path to success. Despite its shortcomings, the Military Survey was one of the first national maps to be constructed through actual measurement of the ground, rather than by amalgamating existing charts. It became what we might call a ‘public-private partnership’, and we shall see how this marriage of military concerns