Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt Read Free Book Online Page A

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’.

II
     
    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