The Map That Changed the World (11 page)

Such an order of strata would be repeated also in other places that had never yet been explored. The order would be repeated also in mines yet undug. It was an order that could be well and accurately predicted. The fossils would be the key to working out what the order was. Using them, one could forecast the precise succession of the beds underground. And if they could be forecast, they could and would eventually be mapped.

T
his was true for the coal mines of High Littleton—of that much William Smith was now certain. Yet at the same time as he was realizing and understanding all this, Smith began to wonder: If what he had found was true for the seams, facies, and lithologies of all the rocks that he and the miners had found lying below the red earth—might it not also be true for all the rocks, for the Limestones, Oolites, Shales, Clays, Cherts, Marls, Sandstones, and Silts, that lay above it? And might it not be equally true, too, for rocks so far unfound, and which would presumably lie underneath the coal? Was not this predictability of strata likely to be a universal phenomenon?

The miners said no. Smith records their instant rejection of his theory matter-of-factly. “The order of superposition in the Coal Measures at each pit seemed well enough known to the colliers,” he wrote in his diary,

It was just as well that he was not deterred. He thought about the miners a little more closely. He felt he could understand why, out of a mixture of protection and plain ignorance, a miner might insist that these particular patterns and fingerprints of rock successions that Smith had recognized were confined to
their own
rocks, to the coal measures of the Upper Carboniferous, and would not be reproducible elsewhere. He might understand the miners’ motives—but what they said made no sense at all.

Wasn’t it more likely that some similarly arranged succession of strata was actually to be found among
all
the rocks of England, whether they were above or below the coal? Whether they were younger or older than it? And further, wasn’t it likely, if this orderliness of succession proved true elsewhere, that someone with a good eye and a good imagination could find the arrangements and the possibilities for identifying and following unseen strata, the hidden underground strata, among all the rocks of the world?

Might there not thus be some way of predicting what lay where, how deep it lay, how thick the beds were likely to be, and what might lie above and below it? And thus, might there not be a way of drawing a guide to this hitherto hidden underneath of the planet, in much the same way one drew guides to the visible world, to the simple topography of the overburden?

Had he not, in thinking so, stumbled onto an original, fundamental truth? Wasn’t it likely that everything he had reasoned for the rocks at High Littleton was true for everywhere else as well? And if it was, then wasn’t it likely that everything geological, everywhere—whether it was underground or overground, whether it was deep or shallow, whether it was visible or not—could be predicted, could be drawn, and thus could be mapped?

N
ew observations were needed. More data, more facts, more work, below and beyond the very special world of the coal
mines, beyond the age-limiting, fossil-limiting, lithology-limiting purlieus of the Carboniferous. William Smith needed a bigger canvas on which to sketch the first portrait of what he was now nervously beginning to imagine.

And it was then, thanks to connections, location, and coincidence, that William Smith stumbled onto the chance that made him. The coal from Somerset’s dozens of mines needed to be moved. The perfidious Welsh across the Avon, having caught the duke of Bridgewater’s fierce mania, were reported to be building a canal and getting ready to move their coal along it—and suddenly all Somerset was fretful, its miners and mineowners concerned that the county might lose out to Wales, that its coal would never get to the markets. A great Somerset canal urgently needed to be built.

William Smith, who was by now an established master of all the local mysteries of coal, a clear and present friend to the local landed mineowners, and known to be clever with the theodolite, the plane table, and the chain, was the ideal man to be involved. He knew how to carry out a survey. He was obviously the man to plan the route, to make sure the canal snaked properly from coalfield to market. William Smith, it was decided, should be the Somerset Coal Canal’s first surveyor.

He accepted the job with almost unseemly relish. He had a motive that he never vouchsafed to his new employers. Not only were the wages excellent, the perks more than acceptable, and the possibilities of share options in the new canal tempting—but the process of building a canal meant that, quite simply, a great swath of the county needed to be sliced open, cut neatly and deliberately in half.

And in the process of cutting the land he might be able to confirm his theories, and see if that original and fundamental truth was indeed a truth at all. By slicing open this vast line of survey, and then building a deep canal halfway across the county, the land itself would for the first time be exposed. It would
be laid bare and fresh for Smith to see, to examine in detail, and to wonder if he might, just might, be right.

Right in thinking, that is, that one could tell which strata were which by their nature and by their enclosed fossils. If one could do that one could, in theory, find and identify the outcrop of a particular stratum in one place, and then find and identify it in another place and another, and before long be able to draw a map, from which it would then be possible to extrapolate, with accuracy and speed, the position of that stratum as it snaked through the entire English underworld.

One could do it for one stratum or, with patience, for all strata. One could then draw a map of the underneath of England just as readily as one could map the overground. And if it might be possible to map the underneath of England, then by extension one could make a map of the hidden underside of the whole wide world beyond.

It all depended, though, on his making one so-far-unmade discovery: He needed to find that the aspects of rocks that were so recognizable within the patterns of the coal measures, occurred just as well in the rocks that lay above them. The miners were skeptical. But William Smith was not. He believed that there would be a pattern out there. He needed simply to lay open a great slice of English countryside and see for himself, firsthand. The new canal would be his one opportunity for doing so.

Sonninia sowerbyi

T
he British have an unrequited love affair with their railways. The older, the more obscure, the smokier, the more inefficient, and less commercially successful they are, the better. Dr. Richard Beeching, whose infamous 1965 report resulted in the closure of five thousand miles of old, inefficient but much-loved track and the attendant two thousand railway stations—most of them wrongly remembered as cottagelike and fretworked, with endlessly congenial stationmasters and rose beds planted on the platforms—is still regarded as a villain. The evidence of Beeching’s savagery—abandoned lines now swathed in grass, old bridges rising over emptiness, stations now turned into houses or small factories, or left to rot—remains everywhere. And whole communities in remote and pretty parts of Dorset, Cumberland, Norfolk, and Yorkshire curse him yet, as the man who ruined forever an enchanting and supremely British way of life, along the country railway.

The Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway, in North Somerset, was as pretty a railway as they come. It was known by local
schoolboys, and for obvious onomatopoeic reasons, as the Clank. Its economics, however, made no sense at all, right from the moment it opened for business in 1907. Its tiny income—from a dwindling number of coal mines, from a mill that packaged wool dust, and from the carrying of luggage to and from a boys’ school—doomed it to extinction even before Lord Beeching had the opportunity of getting his hands on its seven miles and seventy-eight chains of track. The last fare-paying passenger traveled on the morning after Valentine’s Day, 1951.

But the Clank was memorialized in the minds of many million of Britons of my generation because it starred, though unrecognized by most who saw it, in one of the most successful British films of the time. It was called
The Titfield Thunderbolt
, and it was a comedy, made in 1952. It told the story of a line that was due for closure but might be awarded a reprieve if it could show that it could be run, by the villagers who depended on it,
with greater efficiency than a competing local bus service. The train was run by a team that included the vicar, the local squire, and the ladies of the Women’s Institute. The bus, by contrast, was owned by a pair of curmudgeonly and profiteering blackguards from a grim slum town nearby. Who won and who lost I will leave for those who have not seen the film; but for this account of William Smith’s life, the story of the film is less important than the setting in which it was made.

The Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway.

For
The Titfield Thunderbolt
was filmed in the valleys of the Cam and Midford Brooks, at the eastern end of the Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway, in countryside that was—and still is—as lovely and as unmistakably English as any landscape imaginable. The film seemed then, and still seems in its time-warped look today, to be set in the middle of some kind of utterly English Elysian fields, where all is sun and lush meadows, babbling brooks and thatched cottages, village greens and cricket matches. On all sides there are comfortable pubs and ample barmaids; the people are by and large sturdy and honorable. The soundtrack drips with a fine nostalgia: There is birdsong, and there are steam whistles, we hear a milk churn being loaded, the flap of a porter’s flag, distant peals of church bells, the lowing of dairy-ready cattle, and behind it all, as bass continuo, the amiable chuff of steam engines as they amble through cuttings and over level crossings and bustle back down the valleys to their sidings and their home.

But this is no fantasy of an imagined Englishness. The railway may have gone, but the world in which the
Thunderbolt
used to run is still there, south of Bath. It has been preserved in some kind of Betjemanesque amber—a patchwork of landscape six miles long by three miles deep, between the river Avon in the east and the village of Combe Hay, halfway westward along the long-disused railway line.

But its beauty peters out very quickly, and with sudden drama. To the west of Combe Hay the land becomes much less interesting, less pretty. A passerby in the train, were it still run
ning, would—if traveling westbound—notice the change most easily, would see how the rural idyll between Limpley and Combe becomes slowly more tinged and tainted by the first indication of industry, of smoke, grit, iron, and rust. By the time the engine reaches Dunkerton, a couple of miles on, the smell of coal dust hangs in the air, and by the next station, Dunkerton Colliery Halt, there is (or was—it has long been demolished) the winding gear of a mine. And then from there to the west all is coal, all is industry, all is grim. It takes a small effort of imagination to recall that only ten miles back down the line, back to the east of Combe Hay, there was pretty landscape—landscape of a loveliness from another world.

The reason, as so often, is the geology. The hills around Combe Hay and Midford Halt, by Midford and Limpley Stoke itself, are the outcrops of what is called Bath stone, a warm, honey-colored oolitic limestone of the Middle Jurassic. A reporter for the
Somerset Guardian
understood this well when, in May 1910, he wrote of a railway journey that “there is not a more prettily situated line in the locality of Bath…the run through the Oolite from Combe Hay to Monkton Combe is the most interesting part of the track, because the traveller has lovely views all the time.”

The oolitic limestone dips gently eastward, much as did the red marls that Smith found in the Mearns Colliery. What this meant to a traveler heading west on the Camerton & Limpley Stoke Line—the map shows it passing in an almost direct westerly direction for most of its route toward the terminus at Camerton and the junction at Hallatrow—is that he or she would pass—or chuff or clank—steadily downward through the geological table, because of the steady dip of the rocks. From the start at Limpley Stoke station he or she would pass much of the way through the Jurassic, from Middle to Lower. Somewhere around Combe Hay Halt he or she might have noticed having entered the outcrop of Triassic rocks. By the time the train has reached Dunkerton Colliery, the traveler will be in the thick of
the Upper Carboniferous, and of the coal.

This much we know today, and a great deal more besides. In William Smith’s time, however, very little was known—and anyone who made that westbound journey from Limpley Stoke to Camerton in 1792 might well have marveled at the change of scenery but would have had precious little understanding of which rock was which; which type might be older or younger than any other; and which appeared where, when it did, and why.

Anyone, that is, except for William Smith. For seven seminal years these few square miles of gently graduated English loveliness were to become Smith’s stamping ground. He worked in precisely the area along which the Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway ran for the 44 years of its commercial existence. He did so because, 120 years before the railway was built, he was to become, after only the briefest of apprenticeships, the man responsible for surveying the canal—a canal that would provide ready-made the route that the railway itself would later take. As it happened, the railway was built to compete with and ultimately replace and ruin the old canal. But here this matters little: What is important for an understanding of Smith’s work is the decisions that were taken by him as to the canal’s initial route.

Both the canal and railway had perforce to start at the same place—Limpley Stoke—because that was the junction for the bigger canal (the Kennet and Avon, along which goods could go to Bristol or to London) and the main-line railway (along which goods could also be taken to the same two industrial centers). Both ended at the same place, Camerton, because that is where the coal was. But the precise route that was taken between these two end points was, essentially, up to William Smith to decide.

The process of choosing that route was to offer him an intimacy with countryside and landscape that was never to leave him. And it was to set him wondering, too, about all those mysteries that eluded, or did not even appear to concern, those others who might travel between the two ends of the coal mine route. Why such a journey began in an area of limitless beauty,
and why it ended in a region so very much less attractive, would to them be either an enigma or a matter of no consequence.

But not to Smith. He was different; his view was different. He alone would in time come to recognize that the simple gradation in the rural loveliness of the canal route said something well worth knowing about Somerset’s mysterious underworld. His genius—the unanticipated genius of this uneducated farmer’s son—was that he realized it was not simply a matter of noticing the difference. It was also possible—desirable, and perhaps important—to find out just
why
there was a difference in the first place.

His survey of the canal was the means to such a discovery. In a sense the fact that he was making a new canal became eventually almost incidental to his own self-allotted main task—which was to find out why the landscape was the way it appeared to be, and whether any of the lessons he had learned in the coal mines, and which the miners insisted belonged to mines alone, could apply out in the wider geological world as well. The red marls of the High Littleton mines dipped east; the oolite and Triassic rocks of the canal route dipped east—so could any firm prediction that he made about the one be equally applied to the other? Smith thought so; and the survey would confirm or not, as the case might be.

In making the route for the new canal he would be digging his way through the very rocks that made the hills—lovely but unproductive hills in the east, their aesthetically unremarkable but richly endowed equivalents in the west—that stood in the way of himself, of the canal, and of progress. If only what he found would ultimately confirm what he had suspected from his explorations in the shafts at the Mearns Colliery in High Littleton, then his work for the newly formed and comfortably subscribed Somerset Coal Canal Company Ltd., was likely to be of earth-changing importance. Smith knew that if he cracked the code he suspected he might find during his surveys, then in time he could become a famous man.

For William Smith was now a changed and changing figure.
Until he moved down from Gloucestershire to Somerset he was a man of seemingly modest vision. The small epiphany that occurred during his stay in High Littleton showed him the advantages of ambition; once he had started to work for the canal company that new ambition was to be annealed and case-hardened, until Smith became convinced that he would one day, and with good reason, enjoy a place in history.

He needed a brief period of apprenticeship. By good fortune the renowned Scotsman John Rennie—a towering figure of the day, a man who specialized in making the massive, in building lasting structures like dockyards, bridges, tunnels, breakwaters, and lighthouses—was working nearby. Rennie had evidently heard talk in the local inns of the parliamentary petition for a new small canal in Somerset, and, always eager for new commissions and fresh work, he signed up to make the initial survey for the route of what was first to be called the Dunkerton & Radstock Canal. But he was too busy to work alone, and needed help.

Two members of the Somerset canal committee, to whom Lady Jones had enthused about William Smith’s acuity and intelligence, suggested his name. Rennie agreed to meet Smith, and liked him immediately. The great engineer hired the young surveyor on the spot. It was a moment that changed Smith’s life forever—particularly since Rennie’s own idea was that, if all worked out well, Smith himself would in short order take on the job of surveyor and engineer for the entire canal project. And this is precisely what happened: He got the full-time job, and embarked on an association with the Somerset Coal Canal that remains central to his reputation to this day. Seek out any local enthusiast who can still discern the old ruined waterway snaking along its forgotten route through the hayfields:
Smith built that, you know. Great man.

The young man threw himself into the job with great enthusiasm. Not only did his new responsibilities allow him to rub shoulders with such notables as John Rennie and another acclaimed canal builder who was also working nearby, William
Jessop. Not only did it allow him to explore a particularly lovely piece of English countryside. Not only did it give him an opportunity for both the advancement of a budding career and to take part in the creation of a monument. It allowed him also, and at last, to test his grand ideas.