Map of a Nation (35 page)

In 1757 the politician and philosopher Edmund Burke had published
A
Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
, which
he was said to have written nine years earlier, at the precocious age of
nineteen
. Meaning literally ‘up to the limits’, the notion of sublimity increasingly caught the imagination of philosophers, writers and artists in the eighteenth century as a way of describing emotional and imaginative responses to the powerful and destructive aspects of landscape. A glimpse of a yawning chasm, a louring mountain whose dark shadow at dusk appears to follow one ‘like a living thing’ (as Wordsworth put it), a vertiginous position above a crashing waterfall, or a sudden revelation of a view whose magnitude leaves one speechless are all sublime experiences: moments that take one to the edge of reason. Burke’s
Philosophical Inquiry
articulated a growing sense that the value of landscape lay not just in its fertility or functionality, but in its irrational, imaginative or aesthetic qualities too. This was a new mapping of the landscape whereby mountainous and other similarly dramatic scenes, such as those in North Wales, Highland Scotland and the Lake District, became popular visiting sites in the second half of the eighteenth century.

In the summer of 1770 a Cumbrian clergyman and headmaster, the Reverend William Gilpin, who was inspired by this sensibility, began a
holiday
at Hounslow Heath. Anticipating the footsteps of William Mudge, he made his way to Berkshire, Gloucestershire and the Vale of Severn, and finally arrived in the Wye Valley. Gilpin spent a summer lovingly tracing its contours. It was there that he came up with ‘a new object’ of tourism: ‘that of examining the face of a country
by the rules of picturesque beauty
’. By ‘
picturesque
’ Gilpin meant ‘that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture’. When he looked at a natural scene, he sought resemblances with the type of landscape painting executed by the seventeenth-century artists Salvator Rosa, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine. In the Wye Valley, Gilpin found exactly what he was after. The river’s lofty arboreal banks and serpentine course created views ‘of the most beautiful kind of perspective; free from the formality of lines’. Almost every vista seemed to be constructed like a theatrical scene, with a foreground, ‘two side-screens’ composed of the river’s wooded sides, and a ‘front-screen’ made up of the winding Wye. The region’s centrepiece, the ruined Cistercian abbey at Tintern, a few miles south of Mudge’s viewpoint at Trellech Beacon, provided ‘the most beautiful and picturesque view on the river’.

Gilpin published the theories of picturesque beauty that he formulated during his Wye tour in numerous essays in the 1780s and 1790s, in which he defined the types of landscape that most successfully produced the
picturesque
effects after which he hunted. Preferring the organic to the artificial, and fascinated by natural processes of decay, Gilpin favoured uneven
surfaces
, ruined buildings, overgrown gardens, and poor and decrepit human figures. Like Burke’s notions of the sublime and the beautiful, Gilpin’s
language
of the ‘picturesque’ was a form of aesthetic mapping or ‘cultural cartography’, and it inspired multitudes of late-eighteenth-century British tourists. Thousands flocked to the Wye in his footsteps. Many furnished themselves with a dazzling array of accoutrements in their hunt for these picturesque effects, such as a series of lenses and convex mirrors that were designed to alter the hue of a scene and compress and frame it. The Claude Glass, named after the French landscape painter Claude Lorraine, consisted of four or five tinted lenses, each of which was designed to alter the
atmosphere
of the landscape. ‘If the hues are well sorted,’ Gilpin explained, ‘they give the object of nature a soft mellow tinge, like the coloring of that master.’ Clutching their lenses and mirrors, their sketchbooks and sometimes even ‘magnifiers for botany, a sixteen-inch tape-measure’, barometers and
geological
hammers, these tourists of the late eighteenth century possessed an enthusiasm for the observation and experience of the natural world not unlike the professional map-making figures of Mudge and Colby. However, whereas the Ordnance Surveyors created an image of the landscape through empirical measurement, Gilpin emphasised that picturesque tourists should eschew reason in favour of spontaneous emotion.

From Trellech Beacon, Mudge and Colby looked down on the Wye Valley and found a very different scene from that perceived by the picturesque tourists that surrounded them. Selecting a viewpoint that allowed him to see as much of the valley as possible, Mudge superimposed in his imagination a schema of geometric shapes, numbers and angles onto the Wye’s winding banks and misty water. On that same scene, an Interior Surveyor would later conjure up within Mudge’s triangles (which were often traced onto the fair plans) a small number of icons. In place of the orchards that peppered the Wye’s banks, each comprised of idiosyncratic trees bearing a variety of
fruit, an Interior Surveyor would draw a regimented display of identikit
cartoon
shrubs. Instead of delighting in the river’s coquettish disappearances and returns, the map-maker dragged it out into the open, clearly tracing its course in thick blue ink on paper. The highlight of the Wye Valley tour, Tintern Abbey, became a simple red square, the generic symbol of a
building
, on the fair plans. The Trigonometrical and Interior Surveyors saw in the Wye Valley another opportunity to exercise their faculties of reason. They mapped the landscape according to the demands of truth and
accuracy
.

But when ‘picturesque’ tourists looked at that same scene, they found
something
quite different: a shifting series of possible paintings. Where Mudge and Colby purposefully attained high viewpoints to fully ‘open up’ the
landscape
beneath, Gilpin instead advised travellers to submerge themselves deeply in the valley’s nooks and crannies. A footnote added to a work by the poet and scholar Thomas Gray in 1775 emphasised that ‘the
Picturesque Point
is always … low in all prospects’. With every step they took, these
picturesque
tourists were presented with different views, each with its own distinct background and foreground. From this sunken stance, the region’s latent and overarching geometry and harmony remained obscured, and was replaced by a continually changing vista of exquisite images. Where the Ordnance Survey ironed out the idiosyncrasies of trees, foliage and buildings to a series of uniform icons and lines, picturesque tourists instead revelled in the
intricacies
of each scene: a piece of moss, growing on the eroded brickwork of the Abbey, or the hunched back of a poverty-stricken labourer. Mudge and Colby prioritised reason, quantification and detailed analysis, but Gilpin described how the sight of ‘some grand scene’ should affect the observer ‘beyond the power of thought’ so that ‘we rather
feel
, than
survey
it’. The
differences
between the Ordnance Surveyors and the picturesque tourists were manifested in more mundane ways too. Mudge found the tourists a disturbance and obstruction to his observations, and he fantasised to Colby about ‘future almost inaccessible positions’ in the landscape, which will ‘perfectly free you from all disagreeable intrusions. All those swarms of idle holiday
visitors
will visit you no more, they will remain at home, like flies from tempests all couched under shade.’

 

W
ILLIAM
M
UDGE AND
Thomas Colby completed their observations at Trellech Beacon towards the middle of the surveying season of 1804. They then turned west. Colby was an ancestral Welshman and he knew that from this panoramic trig station the Trigonometrical Surveyors would be able to generate triangles of sight lines reaching into the heart of the Welsh valleys, to Garth Mountain near Pentyrch,
2
over to Ogmore in the Vale of Glamorgan, Llangeinor near Bridgend, up to the mountain of Mynydd Maen (or Mynydd Twyn-Glas), north of Abergavenny, and further and
further
west. Finally Mudge and Colby would find themselves lodged in the heart of the Preseli Mountains in north Pembrokeshire, revelling in
spectacular
sea views on almost all sides. This series of triangles would ultimately reach up to Aberystwyth, on the west coast of Wales, which was the hub where multiple series of triangles converged. Here, the triangulation that hugged Wales’s south coast would join onto a series that the surveyors planned to measure going east, mountain-hopping all the way through
central
Wales and back to Trellech Beacon. Aberystwyth was also the junction with an intended chain of triangles that was to travel up through Anglesey to a new baseline at Rhuddlan Marsh, on the north coast of Wales near Rhyl, at the border of Flintshire and Denbighshire.

In September 1806, the Trigonometrical Surveyors found themselves in the small town of Rhuddlan to measure this base of verification, before
observing
the triangles that would lead them back to Aberystwyth. The discovery of an appropriate baseline of verification was eased by the cooperation of the marsh’s owner, who was very happy to hand over to Mudge and Colby a
private large-scale plan of the territory. For the south-eastern end of the base, Mudge settled on a spot adjacent to Rhuddlan Bridge. This lay in the shadow of a thirteenth-century castle that had been built on the orders of Edward I, the Plantagenet king who subdued the Celts, after much
resistance
, and conquered Wales. It was here that in 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan, the document that formally enshrined the English conquest of Wales, was signed. The sight of an English military surveyor mapping Wales at such a historically charged spot may have roused heated feelings among the locals. From this south-eastern end at Rhuddlan Bridge, the baseline extended just over five miles north-west, over a flat, marshy piece of territory, to a point on the coast north of the settlement of Abergele.

The measurement of the Rhuddlan Marsh base allowed Mudge to check to his satisfaction the accuracy of the triangles that joined it with the
baseline
at Hounslow Heath and another series of triangles that led to a base that had been measured by the Ordnance Survey at Misterton Carr near Doncaster in the summer of 1802. It also allowed him to generate a new chain of triangles along the sublimely mountainous north and north-west regions of Wales, which would eventually meet up at Aberystwyth with the series that had been observed along the south coast. As the triangles left the west end of the Rhuddlan Marsh baseline, they hopped over to Llanelian, near Colwyn Bay, to Great Orme on the Creuddyn Peninsula, to Moelfre on Anglesey and then down into Snowdonia. The Surveyors had no choice but to carry the 200-pound theodolite and its oak-framed ‘portable’ observatory up the 3560-foot height of Snowdon itself, then over to the rather more gentle peak of Arenig Fawr, and on up the glacial Cadair (or Cader) Idris (in folklore the armchair of the giant Idris).

It was here that the daily drudgery of their task began to weigh on the map-makers. It was, as one put it, ‘a wild and most arduous service’. An
eyewitness
to the Ordnance Surveyors’ work at the top of Snowdon recounted with awed admiration how ‘the mountain tapered at last into a complete cone, terminating in a summit, on which there was just room to spread out a tent for the protection of some mathematical instruments’. Snowdon’s confined pinnacle forced the director to pitch ‘several tents, a little lower down, for the accommodation of himself and his men’. But the discomfort
at the mountain’s peak was offset by its miraculous view. ‘Snowdon,’ this
witness
observed, ‘lies right in the centre of the British world, and commands from its summit, views at once of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and of the intermediate islands of Anglesey and Man.’