Map of a Nation (57 page)

A
COUPLE OF
summers ago, while researching this book, I spent a few days in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire tracing the paths of William Roy’s childhood. At around three o’clock one afternoon on a glorious Saturday in July, I stopped for a swig of water and a quick consultation of the Ordnance Survey
Explorer
map in my backpack. The chart showed that about a mile ahead on the minor country road on which I was walking, a small path would loop away to take in what the map described in archaic font as a ‘Non-Roman Tower’. Intrigued, I followed the footpath away from the road, walking along lush fields that sloped down to the Clyde, then through a small dense wood and out the other side. There the path unexpectedly forked into a neat gravelled driveway curling up to a beautiful and somewhat imposing manor house, merely an innocuous rectangle on the map. Continuing along the left side of the fork, I met the Non-Roman Tower, a satisfyingly decrepit pyramid of stones nestling amid bracken and shadowy trees. Now,
according
to the map, the thin black dotted line of the path should curve around to rejoin the yellow streak of the road. And so it did. But between the two was a high and solid set of electronic gates, which were shut.

Shrugging my bag from my back, I unfolded the map again. As I was
scanning
it, a low growl came from somewhere below the sheet and I raised the map to reveal a large Kangal Dog, which in other circumstances might have been a rather handsome beast, but was now looking decidedly threatening. Growling persistently, he nudged at my knee. I took a step back. The dog pushed again, harder this time, and I took a large backwards sidestep that placed me behind a gate, in a field speckled with sheep. The animal seemed pacified and stopped growling, and after a couple of minutes he even lay on the path in front of the gate and closed his eyes. Resolving to retrace my steps and rejoin the road the way I had come, I decided to tiptoe around my sleeping gaoler. But as soon as I pushed the gate open, the dog was on his feet and snarls and barks replaced the earlier growls. Hurriedly retreating into the safety of the field, this pattern continued for a good ten minutes. Dog slept – I tried to escape – dog awoke. I couldn’t stay there all day, and after a bit of yelling had failed to rouse anyone, I decided to ring Directory Enquiries on my mobile phone and ask to be put through to the inmates of the large mansion down the drive.

‘Name and town?’ a bored voice enquired.

‘Um, I don’t know the owner, but I can give you the name of the house,’ I replied hopefully.

‘I need the surname of its occupant, madam.’

It seemed faintly absurd that I knew the names of the families who had lived at that house through the 1720s and 1730s, through William Roy’s childhood and early adolescence, but not its present owners. And, rightly, I didn’t hold out many hopes that this antiquated knowledge would prove much practical use. The phone call to Directory Enquiries failed to free me from my tight spot and I resorted to shouting again. After twenty minutes, a fresh-faced young man in tweeds eventually emerged up the driveway and, patting his thigh, summoned the dog, who gave up his sentinel position. As I blustered apologies and explanations, the two walked me along the path and the man typed in a code to open the electronic gates and restore me to the map’s yellow streak.

Back on the road, I was confused. Had I been right to apologise? Or did the electric gates and angry guard-dog contravene Scotland’s Land Reform Act of 2003, which enshrines the right to universal access to the land? I am still not sure. But it strikes me now that one of the reasons I find Ordnance Survey maps so seductive is the promise they seem to offer of the unfettered
freedom to wander across the British landscape. Although maps also have the important function of demarcating where one
cannot
go, those as detailed as the Ordnance Survey’s allow one to stray from the road and improvise routes at will, without a set itinerary. In England and Wales, they appear to bolster the Countryside and Rights of Way (‘Right to Roam’) Act of 2000, which ‘provides a new right of public access on foot to areas of open land comprising mountain, moor, heath, down, and registered common land, and contains provisions for extending the right to coastal land’. Some philosophers feel that maps stimulate free wondering as well as wandering: that they encourage the mind to eschew linear logic and play with
randomness
and free associations, like the rambler who leaves the confines of major roads to skit over wide expanses of purple heath.

This association between maps and freedom has recently been manifested in campaigns to ‘Free Our Data’, which seek to ‘persuade the government to abandon copyright on essential national [information], making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies’. Campaigners have targeted the Ordnance Survey as a significant ‘culprit’ whose pricey information (in the form of its database of geographical information) was described as ‘useful to any business that wanted to provide a service in the UK, yet out of reach of startup companies without deep pockets’. There is a widespread feeling that the Ordnance Survey should foster the same principles of free access in the digital domain as those granted by their maps to ramblers who pass with
relative
liberty over moors and mountains. And on 1 April 2010 the agency made thirteen data sets freely available to the public, ranging from a
small-scale
map of the whole of Great Britain, to boundary information and a national gazetteer of road names.

The idea of freedom that many of us associate with the Ordnance Survey was arguably born in its first decades, over the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth
centuries, in the period described in this book. Not only did a home-grown tourist industry and penchant for hiking begin to take off then in Britain, but travellers gradually transferred their dependence from human guides to guidebooks and published itineraries and finally to maps. And with each shift, they gained a wider view of the landscape through which
they journeyed, allowing freer improvisation over its contours. Although thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods often entertained conflicting interpretations of the significance of maps – one as emblems of reason and the other as images of the imagination – the modern connection of Ordnance Survey maps with freedom in the landscape is indebted to both. It was during the Enlightenment that maps acquired their associations with political liberty and egalitarianism, and it was during the Romantic period that this was supplemented by a deeply felt love for nature and
solitary
wandering. Proponents of both movements projected these ideas onto the great ‘national undertaking’, the Ordnance Survey.

As I write, well into the twenty-first century, the Ordnance Survey looks very different to the young mapping agency we have seen come to life. Now over three hundred map-makers trace the shape of the British Isles with the most advanced technology, such as laser-driven theodolites, hand-held pen computers, digital aerial images from satellites, and Geographic Information and Global Positioning Systems. The maps themselves are taking different forms, and the view of the landscape that was once offered by the ‘traverse survey’ or strip map now finds a modern equivalent in satnav systems that translate the landscape into a series of instructions of ‘turn right’, ‘turn left’ and ‘turn around’. There are some who lament that these ‘new maps’
represent
a step backwards, into the relative myopia towards Britain’s landscape that characterised public geographical awareness before the Ordnance Survey. For example, the
Sun
has worried that Google maps omit important features like Stonehenge from the scenery that separates major roads, and that ‘the simple directions from the internet and satellite navigation systems are wiping our historic landmarks and monuments from our national consciousness’. But it seems to me that Britons enjoy a greater geographical acquaintance with the country in which they live than ever before. Satnavs provide only one form of this knowledge, and can be supplemented with a wealth of online maps, hand-held digital navigational devices and
mobile-phone
applications, not forgetting the more traditional aids of the map and compass. Ordnance Survey maps never had the monopoly on geographical information, and now, as in the earliest years of its endeavour, map-readers continue to be drawn to ‘the equal wide survey’ (as the poet James Thomson
expressed it in his poem
Liberty
in 1735) that they offer of the nation’s varied scenery. That we are fortunate enough to live amid such abundance of knowledge can largely be traced back to a small group of men hunched over a theodolite on top of a mountain, in bucketing rain, over two hundred years ago.

 

After 1752 Britain began to adopt the revised Gregorian calendar, which was ten to eleven days ahead (in the period covered by this book) of the Julian calendar. I have given dates as they appeared in manuscript sources. Where possible, I have also retained the original spellings used by the documents’ authors, with very occasional use of ‘[
sic
]’ to prevent confusion. Manuscript and newspaper sources are given in full in the Notes and are not listed in the Works Cited section. Otherwise, the Notes refer to printed sources described in full in the Works Cited section.