Mapping Scotland: Timothy Pont, Blaeu's Atlas and Roy's Military Survey

established claims rest on the surviving manuscripts, the Blaeu correspondence discovered in 1967 (National Library of Scotland, Adv.MS.17.1.9), the British Library's Military Survey sheets, and the research of the National Library of Scotland's map curators and of Jeffrey Stone and Rachel Hewitt. shared claims involve interpretation. traditional claims come from later tradition.

The weak points are these. Hard facts about Pont's life are scarce: his birth and death dates are approximate, and the route and years of his travels are reconstructed from the maps. Many of his maps were lost; some were "much torn and defaced", in Blaeu's words, by the time they reached Amsterdam; and a fire at the Blaeu premises in 1672 may have destroyed others. Robert Gordon overwrote many Pont manuscripts, so not every line on a "Pont" map is Pont's. The Military Survey was not triangulated and had no consistent scale; it is a remarkable sketch, not an accurate modern map.

Timothy Pont, the first surveyor

established Timothy Pont was born about 1565, probably at Shiresmill in Fife, the second son of Robert Pont, a minister, lawyer and Lord of Session. He studied at St Andrews from 1580 to 1583, where he may have learned surveying from the law professor William Welwood. Over the next dozen years he travelled across much of the country, drawing what he saw: rivers and lochs, hills shown as little sketched profiles, tower houses, kirks, mills and woodland, with hundreds of place-names. He was paid in 1593 to survey Orkney and Shetland for minerals. Only one of his maps carries a date, Clydesdale, September and October 1596.

shared Pont seems to have intended a printed atlas. Robert Gordon later wrote that he was "defeated by the greed of printers and booksellers". Only one of his maps, of Lothian and Linlithgow, was engraved in his lifetime. He became minister of Dunnet in Caithness in 1601 and died around 1614.

From Pont to Blaeu

established By 1629 Sir James Balfour of Denmilne, later Lord Lyon, had bought Pont's papers from his heirs, and Charles I granted him £100 to help publish them, noting that James VI had meant to support Pont. The prime mover was Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit, Director of Chancery and a judge, who corresponded with the Blaeus in Amsterdam for three decades. Fifteen of their letters to him were found in 1967. The manuscripts went to Amsterdam, where Blaeu found them, he wrote, "much torn and defaced".

established To fill the gaps, Scot recruited the Aberdeenshire laird Robert Gordon of Straloch, who between 1636 and 1641 compiled more than sixty maps from Pont's work, and his son James Gordon, minister of Rothiemay, who mapped Fife and drew bird's-eye views of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In 1641 Scot persuaded the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to ask ministers for written descriptions of their shires. Support faded, and the Assembly had to repeat its request four times by 1649. When the Civil War drove Scot to the Low Countries in 1645, he dictated regional details to Joan Blaeu from memory.

The 1654 Atlas

established Blaeu had engraved most of the Scottish maps by 1642, but war and politics delayed publication. The Scottish volume finally appeared in 1654 as volume V of the Atlas Novus, in Latin, with 49 maps of Scotland and six of Ireland, after the end of the Anglo-Dutch war and with a licence from Oliver Cromwell. Dutch, French and German editions followed the same year. Joan Blaeu credited 36 regional maps to Pont and said the Gordons had given the work "the finishing touches".

shared The atlas fixed the image of Scotland for well over a century. Its maps were copied by later mapmakers, and Pont's manuscripts remain one of the best sources for the late sixteenth-century landscape: they record tower houses, settlements and place-names that have since vanished.

The Military Survey, 1747–1755

established The Jacobite rising of 1745–46 found the government's generals, as one of them later wrote, "greatly embarrassed for want of a proper Survey of the Country". In 1747 Colonel David Watson, deputy quartermaster-general, was instructed to survey the Highlands, as part of a programme of roads and forts. He gave the fieldwork to William Roy, a 21-year-old from Miltonhead near Carluke, the son of an estate factor. From 1748 there were six survey parties, each made up of an engineer, a non-commissioned officer and six soldiers. They measured traverses along roads, rivers and lochs with chains and seven-inch compasses; settlements, fields, woods and hills were sketched by eye. The Highlands were largely done by 1752, and the survey was extended to the south. The Seven Years' War ended it in 1755. The young artist Paul Sandby worked as a draughtsman on the survey before becoming a celebrated watercolourist.

shared The result was a vivid, hand-coloured picture of Scotland before the agricultural improvers and the Clearances transformed it: runrig strips, cottages, shielings and woods, at a scale of roughly 1,000 yards to an inch. Roy himself called it "rather a magnificent military sketch, than a very accurate map". It was never engraved, and it now belongs to the British Library.

From Roy to the Ordnance Survey

established Roy made his career in the army's engineers and rose to major-general. He pressed for a proper trigonometrical survey of Britain, and in the 1780s led the British side of the triangulation linking the Greenwich and Paris observatories. He measured a baseline on Hounslow Heath in 1784, and had Jesse Ramsden build a great three-foot theodolite. Roy died in 1790. The next year the Board of Ordnance founded the Trigonometrical Survey, which became the Ordnance Survey.

shared Scotland played its part in the science of mapping. In 1774 the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne measured the pull of the mountain Schiehallion on a plumb line to estimate the density of the Earth. In processing the survey of the mountain, Charles Hutton is often credited with inventing contour lines, though Edmond Halley had used comparable lines on a magnetic chart at the start of the eighteenth century. The Ordnance Survey's detailed six-inch maps of Scotland were made between 1843 and 1882.

• Only one of Timothy Pont's maps is dated: Clydesdale, surveyed in September and October 1596.
• The Church of Scotland's General Assembly asked every presbytery to help Blaeu's atlas, and had to repeat its request four times.
• Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit, in exile in 1645, dictated details of Scotland to Joan Blaeu from memory.
• Blaeu's Scottish atlas needed a licence from Oliver Cromwell to be sold in Britain.
• The watercolourist Paul Sandby learned his trade drawing the Highlands for the army after Culloden.
• William Roy described his own great map as "rather a magnificent military sketch".

• Do not say Pont "mapped all of Scotland": parts of his work are lost, and his surviving maps cover the country unevenly.
• Do not treat every line on the Blaeu maps as Pont's own: Robert Gordon redrew and added to many of them.
• Do not call Roy's Military Survey an accurate modern map. It was made by traverse, not triangulation, and had no consistent scale.
• Do not say Roy founded the Ordnance Survey; it was founded the year after his death.
• The claim that Charles Hutton invented contour lines at Schiehallion is widely repeated but contested.