produce of each part of a Country, and how Inhabited, if abounding in Grass and Hay’. All of these ‘particulars you may be easily informed’ about ‘after some Acquaintance with a Judicious Countryman’, Watson declared confidently. The first years of the Military Survey must have taken their toll on Roy and when on Christmas Day 1748 his father died, we can imagine that the prospect of returning to work in the spring to begin another season of mapping the Highlands mile by mile, alone, was daunting.
There was some compensation for Roy’s graft, however. It is easy to romanticise the life of the map-maker: to imagine the exhilarating panoramas, the plentiful moments of peace and the loving familiarity engendered with every fold of the landscape. But although this was not the whole truth, Roy didrhapsodise over ‘a scene the most wild and romantic that can be imagined’ at Coigach, a peninsula in Wester Ross in the north-west Highlands. And the intense solitude and silence did not trouble him. Where David Watson revelled in easy anecdote among the higher reaches of Hanoverian society, Roy by his own admission did not ‘love much talking’. ‘I am for coming to the point,’ he admitted ruefully. He would later write that ‘a much truer notion may be formed’ of the nation in maps ‘than what could possibly be conveyed in many words’.
D AVID W ATSON WAS all too aware that William Roy was faced with the mammoth task of constructing a map of the Scottish Highlands on his own. Since the earliest days of the endeavour Watson had repeatedly petitioned the Board of Ordnance for assistance for his young employee, but nothing had materialised. In 1748, almost a year after the Military Survey’s commencement , Watson received the displeasing information that two engineers who had been expressly promised for the Military Survey were to be employed elsewhere. ‘The Surveying Scheme has given me Infinite Pain,’ he complained to the Chief of Engineers in Scotland, William Skinner. In March 1749 the Board finally relented. Almost two years into the project, George II consented to Roy ‘having three more Assistants in the Survey he is making of Scotland’. Very little documentation from the Military Survey has survived, so it is hard to pinpoint how much of the Highlands Roy had managed to cover on his own, but we can surmise from Watson’s continual appeals for assistance that his progress had been rather slow.
Watson travelled down to London to choose three new map-makers from among the cadets at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. Only founded eight years before, Woolwich had been designed to provide instruction for ‘the people of its Military Branch to form good Officers of Artillery and perfect Engineers’. One of eight military academies established in Europe in the mid eighteenth century, the institution offered a thorough education in the mathematical theory and military science required by cadetswho were destined for one of the two corps of the Board of Ordnance. Woolwich taught its cadets to survey according to different methods, to employ a variety of instruments, to use mathematical formulae to manipulate calculations of angles and lengths, and to reconcile a number of divergent measurements. The institution also instructed its cadets in landscape painting and the traditions of map draughtsmanship deriving from European military schools. It taught the technique of ‘hachuring’ to represent hills and mountains, a form of shading that consisted of small strokes drawn in the direction of the steepest slope. The teachers of the Woolwich Academy hoped to instil a uniformity of skill into the Corps of Engineers.
When Watson applied to the Royal Military Academy in 1749 for assistants for the Military Survey, that institution housed forty-seven cadets. Its exacting ‘Deputy Head Master’ John Muller was despairing of the quality of many of his students, who he dismissed as ‘Idle’,
There was some compensation for Roy’s graft, however. It is easy to romanticise the life of the map-maker: to imagine the exhilarating panoramas, the plentiful moments of peace and the loving familiarity engendered with every fold of the landscape. But although this was not the whole truth, Roy didrhapsodise over ‘a scene the most wild and romantic that can be imagined’ at Coigach, a peninsula in Wester Ross in the north-west Highlands. And the intense solitude and silence did not trouble him. Where David Watson revelled in easy anecdote among the higher reaches of Hanoverian society, Roy by his own admission did not ‘love much talking’. ‘I am for coming to the point,’ he admitted ruefully. He would later write that ‘a much truer notion may be formed’ of the nation in maps ‘than what could possibly be conveyed in many words’.
D AVID W ATSON WAS all too aware that William Roy was faced with the mammoth task of constructing a map of the Scottish Highlands on his own. Since the earliest days of the endeavour Watson had repeatedly petitioned the Board of Ordnance for assistance for his young employee, but nothing had materialised. In 1748, almost a year after the Military Survey’s commencement , Watson received the displeasing information that two engineers who had been expressly promised for the Military Survey were to be employed elsewhere. ‘The Surveying Scheme has given me Infinite Pain,’ he complained to the Chief of Engineers in Scotland, William Skinner. In March 1749 the Board finally relented. Almost two years into the project, George II consented to Roy ‘having three more Assistants in the Survey he is making of Scotland’. Very little documentation from the Military Survey has survived, so it is hard to pinpoint how much of the Highlands Roy had managed to cover on his own, but we can surmise from Watson’s continual appeals for assistance that his progress had been rather slow.
Watson travelled down to London to choose three new map-makers from among the cadets at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. Only founded eight years before, Woolwich had been designed to provide instruction for ‘the people of its Military Branch to form good Officers of Artillery and perfect Engineers’. One of eight military academies established in Europe in the mid eighteenth century, the institution offered a thorough education in the mathematical theory and military science required by cadetswho were destined for one of the two corps of the Board of Ordnance. Woolwich taught its cadets to survey according to different methods, to employ a variety of instruments, to use mathematical formulae to manipulate calculations of angles and lengths, and to reconcile a number of divergent measurements. The institution also instructed its cadets in landscape painting and the traditions of map draughtsmanship deriving from European military schools. It taught the technique of ‘hachuring’ to represent hills and mountains, a form of shading that consisted of small strokes drawn in the direction of the steepest slope. The teachers of the Woolwich Academy hoped to instil a uniformity of skill into the Corps of Engineers.
When Watson applied to the Royal Military Academy in 1749 for assistants for the Military Survey, that institution housed forty-seven cadets. Its exacting ‘Deputy Head Master’ John Muller was despairing of the quality of many of his students, who he dismissed as ‘Idle’,
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