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

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 introductionof 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 hisenergies 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