Map of a Nation (7 page)

Although little documentation has survived from John Roy’s employment at Hallcraig and Milton, the estate maps on which he relied were almost certainly constructed with two instruments, called a ‘plane table’ and an ‘alidade’. An alidade was a mechanism that allowed an object to be brought within a straight line of eyesight, and developed from the historical
astronomical
instrument known as the astrolabe, which was used to determine latitude. Deriving from an Arabic word meaning ‘ruler’, early alidades
consisted
of two vanes, each of which contained a thin hole or slot (without lenses) which was placed at either end of a small bar. A plane table
comprised
a level surface mounted on a robust base, and it had been used in surveying since the sixteenth century, perhaps even earlier, and generally with an alidade. We can imagine William’s father teaching the young boy to make a map of his employer’s estate using these two instruments. John Roy would have first measured a small baseline in a field on the Hallcraig estate, a straight, flat distance whose length depended on the size of the land to be surveyed. He drew this base on a sheet of paper that was fastened onto the surface of the plane table, and positioned the table directly over one end of the actual baseline so that it was in perfect alignment with the marking of
that same spot on the paper. Crouching down, and bringing his eye to the level of the table, John showed William how one of the alidade’s vanes should be placed at the mark indicating the end of the base. He then looked along its length, gently shifting the instrument’s position until a landmark on the estate, such as a fountain, was brought into view through both vanes. John now traced onto the paper the straight line of eyesight that passed from the mark of the baseline’s end, along the length of the alidade, to this landmark. Then he moved his plane table to the other end of the baseline, again
perfectly
aligning the actual spot with that drawn on the paper. John Roy now traced a line from
this
end of the baseline to the fountain in the same way as before. Two lines were thus etched onto the embryonic map, radiating out from either end of the baseline to the fountain. The spot where these lines intersected produced the position of the landmark for the map. John showed William how this technique could be replicated over and over again, until an outline of the complex landscape of the estate was plotted onto paper by means of the simplest form of geometry.

It is likely that William Roy was proficient from a young age in the skills of estate surveying and plane-tabling, and it seems that he demonstrated a remarkable early aptitude for map-making. But records regarding the young boy’s formal education are inconclusive: Roy was educated at the nearby grammar school in Lanark, but accounts of his teenage years are silent. It has been suggested that he worked for the Post Office, that he was employed in road-building, or that he was trained by the Army’s Board of Ordnance, but Roy’s name does not crop up on any of those institutions’ records in this period. When the Jacobite Rebellion broke out in 1745, he was nineteen years old. The Upper Ward of Lanarkshire erupted into frenzied activity to halt the progress of the Jacobites as they retreated from Derby back to the Highlands. Initially the Young Pretender’s army intended to march straight through the Ward, as it was ‘the only communication that is open, from the north to England’, as one of the Roys’ neighbours explained. Around 700 local men collected into a resistance force ‘to act for the Defence of His Majesty King George and our present happy constitution’. But in the event, heavy rains meant that the river Clyde was too swollen to be crossed, and the Jacobites were forced to divert their path further east.

He seems to have avoided direct confrontation with the rebels, but the 1745 uprising would change William Roy’s life in an unexpected fashion. The Roys’ employers were relations of Robert Dundas’s wife, Ann Gordon, and at some point they were introduced to Dundas’s brother-in-law from his first marriage, David Watson. In the months that followed Culloden, it may have been that this extended family was brought together for a large
celebratory
meal at Hallcraig House. We can imagine the conversation turning to Highland reform and Watson describing the need for better maps, and Ann leaving the room to fetch the twenty-year-old son of her family’s
land-steward
who had shown a prodigious talent in surveying. A seemingly quiet, rather shy young man, Roy may initially have been nervous before David Watson’s confident personality. But the meeting between the two men,
however
it occurred, was evidently a success. Watson made the decision to appoint Roy to direct the first ‘proper Survey of the Country’ of Scotland. It would prove a far-sighted selection. Roy’s birthplace, the probable site of his first meeting with Watson, is commemorated with a memorial in the shape of a trig point that describes how the young man would grow up to become the most illustrious map-maker of his day, ‘from whose Military Survey of Scotland (Made in 1747–1755) Grew the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain’.

A
S
1747
REACHED
its summer solstice, David Watson was to be found deep in the Scottish Highlands. He was at Fort Augustus, in the middle of the geological fault known as the Great Glen, on the southern tip of Loch Ness, surrounded by a wall of mountains. The garrison had been built on a site called Kiliwhimin in the wake of a Jacobite uprising in 1715, and it was later renamed after William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland. Charles Edward Stuart’s army had seized control of Fort Augustus during the 1745 rebellion and it seems likely that Watson, zealous in his loathing of Jacobitism, would have enjoyed particular satisfaction when the King’s army reclaimed the
settlement
after the Battle of Culloden. From the fort, this venerated, fanatical engineer was helping to coordinate a military occupation of the Highlands. 

The Highlands are now defined as the region that lies both north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault (a line running diagonally between the Firth of Clyde and Stonehaven on the east coast, south of Aberdeen), and west of another natural boundary running roughly between Perth and the Moray Firth. To many early-eighteenth-century English travellers and Lowland Scots, Watson included, the area resembled the ends of the earth. A rare London tourist who visited Scotland in the 1720s commented that ‘the Highlands are but little known even to the inhabitants of the low country of Scotland’ but that ‘to the People of England’ the ‘Highlands are hardly known at all, for there has been less, that I know of, written upon the subject, than on either of the Indies’. In the early eighteenth century the region was very healthily populated, certainly in comparison to today when, in the
aftermath
of a long history of clearances (among other reasons), it is one of the most sparsely peopled areas in Europe. But this abundance of population did not make the Highlands less strange. Numerous visitors were struck by the region’s acute social difference, and one traveller described how ‘that nervous expressive tongue’, Scots Gaelic, was spoken everywhere. For centuries, writers had wondered if the Highlands were, in fact, the mystical lands of Ultima Thule, ‘those regions in which there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a
jellyfish
in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together’.

From Fort Augustus, Watson was charged with overseeing the repair of fortifications and barracks that had been damaged or destroyed during the rebellion, and implementing the construction of new ones. He was also
supervising
the dramatic extension of a network of military roads throughout the Highlands. In the mid eighteenth century Britain’s roads were notoriously bad. Many had been churned over the last few centuries to ‘mere beds of
torrents
and systems of ruts’ under the large, heavy wheels of carts or ploughs. Although in 1555 a Highway Act had attempted to combat this decline by placing responsibility for the upkeep of roads on local parishes and setting aside certain days for their repair by unpaid local inhabitants, this system was uncentralised. As many labourers unsurprisingly resented working on Britain’s roads for free, their quality remained notoriously unpredictable. It was not until the seventeenth century that a combination of the introduction
of the stagecoach and the legislative innovation of the Turnpike Act had begun to revolutionise journeys made by road. Referring to the spiked
barriers
that controlled access to major highways, Turnpike Acts subjected road-users to a toll whose revenue was used for maintenance and repair. But the number of turnpike trusts multiplied agonisingly slowly and they were initially focused solely on major routes leading into London. In any case, prior to the 1720s these innovations to Britain’s roads only applied to networks that ran across England and Lowland Scotland. All major thoroughfares stopped at the border with the Highlands, after which mostly drovers’ routes and similar tracks criss-crossed the landscape.

After two serious Jacobite uprisings in 1715 and 1719, the Hanoverian administration had tried to take the Highlands’ roads in hand. George I sent a senior military officer called George Wade, an Irishman descended from a staunchly anti-Jacobite family, into the region ‘to inspect the present situation of the Highlanders, their customs, manners, and the state of the country’. Wade’s conclusions were devastating. He estimated that ‘the number of men able to bear arms in the Highlands (including the inhabitants of the Isles) are by the nearest computation about 22,000 men, of which number … 12,000 have been engaged in rebellions against your Majesty, and are ready, when ever encouraged by their Superiors, or Heads of Clans, to create new
troubles
, and rise in arms to favour the Pretender’. In vivid detail, Wade described the clans’ practices of robbery and assault, their abundant
possession
of weapons, and ‘the little regard they ever paid to the Laws of the Kingdom, both before and since the Union’. To defend against this
terrifying
foe, he proposed that a militia be created from Highlanders loyal to the Crown, and that permanent barracks of English and Scottish soldiers should be established at Fort William and Inverness.

Seriously alarmed, George I agreed to Wade’s suggestions and by January 1725 the latter had ‘caused an exact Survey to be taken of the several Lakes and that part of the Country lying between Inverness and Fort William, which extends from the East to the West Sea’. But Wade soon realised that his vision of an extensive arrangement of forts across the Highlands was of little use without the means to travel swiftly between them. At that time no major roads extended further than Perthshire, so Wade duly dedicated his
energies to the project for which he is most vividly remembered: a network of military thoroughfares across Scotland. Wade’s roads were the first real attempt to ‘open up’ the Highlands to outsiders. They allowed a steady train of soldiers to travel up from Edinburgh and Glasgow with supplies and artillery, spilling out into barracks, garrisons and forts at Inversnaid, Ruthven, Fort Augustus and Fort William, among other places. Wade’s
successor
, a man called William Caulfeild, reverentially acknowledged his forebear’s achievement, and he and his subordinates were occasionally
overheard
singing the mantra, ‘Had you seen these roads before they were made/ You would lift up your hands and bless General Wade.’

It is probable that when David Watson first mooted the idea of making a ‘Military Survey of Scotland’, he was partly motivated by the thought that such a map would be extremely useful to the extension of Wade’s roads. So in 1747, Watson summoned the son of his extended family’s land-steward to join him in the Highlands, and he commanded William Roy to begin the map with a survey of the region’s existing military highways. (Thanks to a break-in at a flat in London in the late 1920s, no confirmed image of Roy survives, but a possible posthumous caricature shows him in middle age to have sported deep-set dark eyes above a thin Roman nose, cheeks that blushed easily and a gently amused smile.) A single, tattered sheet of
measurements
in the archives of Blair Castle, in Blair Atholl in Perthshire, indicates that one of this young man’s first tasks was to ‘Measure the roads from Inverness[,] Fort Augustus[,] Fort William by Blair & Dunkeld to Perth.’ At some point in the 1750s, Watson compiled a set of ‘Orders and Instructions’ that outlined just how such a survey should be made, and it is likely that he similarly directed Roy to ‘carefully follow the line of the
principal
Roads … every half-mile’s distance minutely expressing every variation or Change that happens’. Watson added that this map-maker should also compile notes about the terrain that immediately surrounded each
thoroughfare
and emphasised that ‘a distinct and useful idea of the nature of any River or Water [is] always of the greatest Consequence’. Both roads and rivers were potential means of passage for troops.

William Roy began the daunting task of mapping Highland Scotland’s roads in the summer of 1747. We can imagine this young man placing a staff
on the perimeter of Fort Augustus, and marking the first bend or kink in the road to Inverness with another. He measured the distance between the two by simple pacing or with a perambulator (otherwise known as a surveyor’s wheel, or ‘waywiser’), an instrument consisting of a handle attached to a wheel, which was pushed along the ground. Each revolution marked out a specific length, usually a yard, and by counting the revolutions with a dial or ‘click’ mechanism, Roy could roughly deduce the length in question. For more accurate but slower measurements of the ground, he used a chain, probably based on the model made by Edmund Gunter in the early
seventeenth
century. Gunter had divided a basic measuring chain of sixty-six feet into one hundred links of equal sizes, which were marked off into groups of ten by brass rings that allowed the map-maker to quickly determine distance.