Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt Page B

with civil and idiosyncratic preoccupations was a feature of the mapping projects by which it was superseded. Perhaps most importantly of all, the Military Survey sparked in William Roy the dream of making a complete and accurate national map of the entire British Isles. But this was an ambition that would not begin to be realised for almost half a century.
     
    1 In 1987, after being bought by a Japanese actor, Milton-Lockhart was dismantled stone by stone. Once Mikhail Gorbachev had granted special permission, it was shipped in thirty containers on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Japan, where the mansion was reconstructed in woodland about a hundred miles from Tokyo. Renamed ‘Lockheart Castle’, it now hosts luxury boutiques and weddings.
    2 Map scales can also be written as fractions to describe the ratio between the distance on paper and the distance on the ground. The Military Survey’s scale of one inch to 1000 yards can be written roughly as the fraction of 1:36,000, as one inch on paper represents around 36,000 inches (there are thirty-six inches per yard) on the ground. Maps are also spoken of as being small-or large-scale. Large-scale maps are surveys of confined spaces subjected to a large magnification; small-scale maps ‘zoom out’ and represent a greater area in less detail. The Military Survey was a small-scale survey in the true sense of the word: an overview of a nation.

 

     
    C HAPTER T WO
     

‘The Propriety of Making a General Military Map of England’
     
    W ILLIAM R OY PROBABLY greeted the news of the Military Survey’s enforced end in 1755 with some trepidation. For the last eight years, this unassuming map-maker had been grateful to find himself accepted into a world of blue woollen uniforms, shiny buttons and strange habits of salutation . When Britain’s politicians led the nation into war, and his friends were called away from their Scottish escapade to more pressing matters, the 29-year -old Roy may have feared he would be left in Scotland, unemployed and alone. If so, he need not have worried. His erstwhile mentor David Watson came to the rescue. By December, he had wangled a position for his young charge in the Corps of Engineers on the lowest rung of that establishment’s hierarchy, which commanded a respectable annual salary of £ 54 15s. Many officers in the Corps of Engineers held positions in the regular army too, and on 24 January 1756 the London Gazette reported that the name of ‘Engineer William Roy’ had been included on a list of lieutenants appointed to a new regiment raised at Exeter. For the first time in his life, Roy enjoyed permanent employment with a regular income, and thrilling prospects. Over the next forty years he would work his way up the ranks to become Britain’s most famous military map-maker.
    In the months that followed the Military Survey, Watson was asked to conduct a reconnaissance of sections of England’s south coast between Dover in Kent and Milford Haven in the far south-west corner of Wales. This was intended to help the Army prepare for a feared French invasion amid the turmoil of the Seven Years War, and Watson chose his two favourite assistants, his nephew David Dundas and Roy, to help him. Existing maps were particularly poor at showing what was known as ‘relief’, the landscape’s three-dimensional characteristics, its undulations and declivities. Roy and Dundas were commanded to trace the rise and fall of southern England’s scenery in words and images, and their resulting descriptions and maps were designed to help tacticians assess the strength and weakness of various locations, depending on their vulnerability to attack. Roy learnt these military techniques quickly and was soon reporting how ‘the Position in front of Dorking’ was ‘very Strong indeed’, as it ‘is cover’d by a Ridge of Heights that takes the Shape of a Bow’, which meant that ‘the Circumstances of the Adjoining Country would Render a Combin’d Attack