Map of a Nation (36 page)

A
DECADE LATER
, in the mid 1810s, after completing ‘the Survey of Norfolk’ and Cambridgeshire, the Interior Survey arrived in Wales to flesh out the triangles that Mudge and Colby had measured with the Great Theodolite. Its principal draughtsman, Robert Dawson, relished the
mountainous
environment. From Carnarvonshire he wrote to the Ordnance Survey’s assistant, Simon Woolcot, that: ‘the range of mountains is more extensive in this neighbourhood and of superior bulk and eminence and has also in general a nearer approximation to the coast, which, perhaps, may account for a greater attraction of the humid vapours exhaled from the sea’. The Ordnance Survey was distinguished from its precursors by its accurate and detailed – and beautiful – portrayal of the landscape’s ‘relief’, its
indentations
and protruberances. Hill drawing was the most taxing element of map draughtsmanship. Almost any trainee map-maker could be taught to plot the course of a road from the measurements taken during a traverse survey. But before the Ordnance Survey formally adopted contour lines in the second half of the nineteenth century, the depiction of relief required an eye that was attuned to every fold of the landscape, each declivity and swell. An aptitude for such sophisticated landscape drawing was considered by many military map-makers to be largely innate, and one engineer
emphasised
that it was vital ‘to select those
who draw well
’ for the Corps, as ‘it is much more easy to teach an Officer to survey than to draw’. Dawson was partly in Wales to try to teach young map-makers how to represent relief as attractively and accurately as possible in their sketches and fair plans.

The Board of Ordnance invested a great deal of time and money in honing the nascent artistic skills of its cadets. The Royal Military Academy at Woolwich paid illustrious painters to tutor its embryonic map-makers.
These included Paul Sandby, who had begun his career as a draughtsman on the Military Survey of Scotland, and subsequently became renowned as a landscape artist and a founding member of the Royal Academy. Robert Dawson, appointed as an instructor of topographical drawing at the Royal Military Academy in High Wycombe and then the chief tutor of the Ordnance Survey’s own trainees, was also employed in the same role by the East India Company in 1810. He put all his students through a rigorous course of hill drawing in the landscape itself, and in the mid 1810s he took some of them to Snowdonia, where he taught them at the same time as
overseeing
the Ordnance Survey’s Interior Survey of Wales. Dawson described how he was ‘aim[ing] at a large and striking example of topography’ in his own ‘new Welsh work’. One witness of Dawson’s creations described how they had achieved ‘a degree of perfection that had given to his plans a beauty and accuracy of expression which some of our eminent artists had previously supposed unattainable’.

In 1816 Dawson produced a plan of Snowdonia that was bordered by the main road running between Dolgellau and Barmouth, and on which north was shown in topsy-turvy fashion at the bottom of the page. At Cadair Idris, glacial erosion has created a horseshoe of steep walls that plummet from the mountain’s top, known as Penygadair (‘top of the chair’), down to a lake called Llyn Cau. The Trigonometrical Survey used levelling techniques and found its height to be 2914 feet above the low-water mark. (Altitude is nowadays
measured
from a ‘Mean Sea Level’ taken at the Tidal Observatory at Newlyn in Cornwall, which gives Cadair Idris a height of 2930 feet.) On Dawson’s map, high points of altitude stand out as exposed patches of relatively blank paper and roads and rivers trace sparse networks of spidery lines across the sheet. Infrequent and tiny dots of red indicate the few small settlements that nestle in the crooks of this mountainous land. But it is Dawson’s intricate depiction of relief that makes this map a truly remarkable production. Cadair Idris’s
spectacular
sheer sides are shown in fine black and brown hachures that border Llyn Cau like hairs on the nape of a neck. The shading elsewhere on the sheet is so effective at creating a sense of the landscape’s plunges and soaring
summits
that it makes me want to run my hand over it, expecting to feel the paper pushing up at my palm like a pop-up scene.

In the mid 1810s, Dawson’s eighteen-year-old son also applied for a place in the Royal Engineers. In support of his application, Robert Kearsley Dawson submitted a bound sketchbook of experiments ‘towards the
expression
of Ground in Topographical Plans’, which included a plan of Snowdonia. Dawson Junior’s sketchbook contained a series of paintings of ‘mathematical forms applicable to hills’, in which he found ghosts of
universal
geometric forms in the landscape’s undulations. The summits of Snowdonia, which his father had represented in exquisite landscape
paintings
, were delineated by Robert Kearsley Dawson as square pyramids, tetrahedra, and ‘conical’ and ‘hemispherical hill[s]’. This was a standard way of learning how to draw peaks but it created a very different picture of the landscape to his father’s maps, which paid loving homage to the minute
idiosyncrasies
of the slopes, summits and troughs of North Wales.

As he aged, the beauty of Robert Dawson Senior’s hills came at an increasingly high price: the neglect of accuracy and detail. In 1832 a
colleague
was forced to complain to Dawson’s superior: ‘I feel it my duty to state, that the details such as the boundaries and filling in of the Parks, Woods and Commons are not so defined on these Plans … as in my
opinion
to enable the reducers and engravers to lay them down without further reference.’ Dawson remained a revered member of the Ordnance Survey and his boss phrased his rebuke with tact: ‘I should be very sorry to see such beautiful Plans as yours mutilated and defaced,’ he assured Dawson. ‘But we want to be clear and of all things to avoid error, and I should hope you might be able to define, beyond the possibility of mistake, the Boundaries of Parks, Commons, and Woods, as also the termination of streams without injuring the effect of the Plans.’ The requirements of art and cartography could pull in opposite directions.

 

T
HE
I
NTERIOR
S
URVEYORS
were not just tasked with the mapping of the physical landscape in Wales. They also had the responsibility of
surveying
its place names, and this would prove much harder than in England.
English map-makers did not have an encouraging history of representing Welsh toponymy. The surveyors that the seventeenth-century map-maker John Ogilby had employed in the construction of his
Britannia Depicta
had tended to jot down the first thing they heard. They duly misunderstood Llandovery as ‘Llaniidosfry’, Carmarthen as ‘Comcarven’ and Rydypennau as ‘Ruddy pene’. In 1757 a scholar and cartographer called Lewis Morris complained that Wales’s place names had been ‘murdered by English
map-makers
’. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the early Ordnance Survey was no exception. At first it followed the pattern that had been set during its mapping of England: surveyors asked locals for place names, jotted them down in notebooks and checked the principal ones against the census and parish records. Proof copies of the finished maps were later sent to local clergymen and landowners for corrections. Robert Dawson reported that the Ordnance Survey should feel itself ‘much indebted’ to the Reverend Hugh Davies of Bangor, who had gone to the ‘trouble of thoroughly
examining
the names … and supplying a great number of corrections’. Thomas Colby made the most of his family connections and commandeered a ‘Mr Colby’ in ‘the Northern part’ of Pembrokeshire to ‘put the proofs into the hands of those whom he judged most likely to detect inaccuracies either in the orthography or Surveying’.

But this system was not nearly sufficient to eradicate mistakes from the maps. The language barrier was like the Himalayas. English-speaking Ordnance Surveyors had extremely variable success in noting down the Welsh place names that they heard spoken aloud. In the St David’s
peninsula
, a rugged piece of coastline in Pembrokeshire, they inscribed ‘Crosswoodig’ instead of Croeswdig, ‘Carfry’ instead of Caerfai and ‘Kingharrod’ instead of Kingheriot. In areas of Wales where English and Welsh were spoken side by side, the situation was even more complicated. In Pembrokeshire, Colby attributed his surveyors’ difficulties to the fact that ‘on one side of it the English language is spoken, on the other side the Welsh, and the orthography of the names of places is continually varying from a Conformity to the usages of the one language to that of the other according to the caprices of the successive persons who possess them’. In such bilingual areas, the same settlement could be referred to by a range of names and
spellings. A Welsh antiquary and naturalist called Lewis Weston Dillwyn took Colby to task for the Ordnance Survey’s negotiation of the different orthographies of Cardiff. ‘You have called it
Caerdiff
,’ Dillwyn pointed out accusatorily, ‘but both by the Corporation itself and by every body else as well as in all legal proceedings it is now universally spelt
Cardiff
, and in this case I should certainly alter it to the latter, for in fact yours is only a sort of hybrid word half Welsh and half English and the real old Welsh word is
Caerfaff
.’

The Ordnance Survey’s map of Pembrokeshire was published in August 1820. By 1821, the Board of Ordnance had received complaints ‘that in the Ordnance Map of Part of Pembrokeshire, the names of some of the Places have been omitted, and that some of them are misspelt’. The surveyors engaged in mapping Wales were commanded by the
Master-General
‘that the utmost care may be taken to avoid such errors in future, and to correct those that may have occurred if not too late’. They
admitted
that ‘we have long been aware of the difficulty, and I might say, impossibility of spelling the Welsh names of places so as to be satisfactory even to those who are considered the best authorities; and it has not
infrequently
happened that to guard against errors of the kind, we have had to erase from the Copper Plate, and enter again in its original state the same name more than once’. ‘But,’ the Interior Surveyors added reassuringly, ‘we have lately adopted a system which answers the end perhaps as completely as may be possible.’

In the 1820s Wales became a laboratory for toponymic innovation. The Interior Surveyors were given greatly enhanced responsibility for
researching
the place names that appeared on their plans. One surveyor elaborated how the map-maker ‘who is employed in the County … together with the drawing which he transmits for the Engravers for publication likewise sends a tabular list of
all
the names on the map, shewing at one view, opposite to
each
name, all the authorities that have been consulted’. Instead of simply relying on corrections made to proof copies by the landed gentry, the Interior Surveyors were now instructed to consult a host of printed and manuscript sources to glean evidence for the existence of different versions of place names in history. The Ordnance Survey built up its own library of
reference works, including William Camden’s
Britannia
, Nicholas Carlisle’s
Topographical Dictionary of England
, and John Adams’s
Index Villaris
, a gazetteer of England and Wales’s ‘Cities, Market-Towns, Parishes, Villages … or other Division[s] of each County’. In addition to the records that they had previously perused when researching English names, the map-makers also referred to Acts of Parliament, topographical dictionaries, documents
pertaining
to local enclosures and parish records. They were also encouraged to make use of the advice of native Welsh speakers. The Interior Surveyors were hunting for evidence of any variation that had existed in the spelling or form of each place name, and they carefully noted down every source they found to justify one spelling over another in specially designated ‘name books’ and tabular place-name sheets, which were then submitted to the Ordnance Survey’s headquarters at the Tower of London. Colby came to formulate a policy of adopting whichever version was recommended by the greatest number of sources. Like Mudge, he preferred forms that were in current usage and spoken by the majority, but he also took into account the historical picture of Wales’s toponymy that was painted by the surveyors’ researches.

These investigations placed an enormous and in many cases inappropriate onus of responsibility on the military engineers. Many struggled. But some were quick learners and acquitted themselves well. A civilian Welsh
map-maker
and engineer called Alfred Thomas noted rather angrily that on the Ordnance Survey maps ‘the words Lan and Llan are often confounded; one signifies an
Eminence
, the other a
church
’. In his reply, an English Ordnance Surveyor called Haslam demonstrated a sophisticated knowledge of Welsh. ‘I cannot help feeling a good deal hurt that the orthography of the Caermarthenshire Sheet should be so unjustly criticised,’ he complained. Haslam pointed out that the ‘words Lan and Llan I would just hint to Mr A. Thomas do
not
always signify an Eminence and a church. The word Llan has three different meanings in the Directory, and in the Map the word was never written without the approbation of the best authority for its proper application.’ But these arguments would not go away. As we shall see, when the Ordnance Survey turned its attentions to Ireland, questions of toponymy would literally split that institution in two.