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‘Lunatic’ and lost to ‘Debauchery, and a thorough neglect of Duty’. There were only a few of whose prospects he was hopeful: a sixteen-year-old Practitioner Engineer already working for the Corps called Hugh Debbieg, a young man with a determined jaw and petulent downturned mouth, and his friend, a cadet called John Williams. William Dundas, the twelve-year-old son of Watson’s brother-in-law Robert Dundas and his second wife Ann Gordon, also happened to be studying at Woolwich. Watson duly made his choice, and Debbieg, Williams and Dundas were packed off to Scotland to join Roy on the Military Survey. Shortly afterwards, the Board of Ordnance found funds for two more assistants, and another Woolwich cadet called Thomas Howse and a slightly more experienced Practitioner Engineer called John Manson were also selected to work on the survey. Roy was thus presented with five assistant map-makers and even a few horses, plus ‘additional Servants, Guides, Interpreters & otherwise’. This was really the bare minimum necessary to make such a survey, and the Board’s provisions were long overdue. Nevertheless, Roy must have been delighted.
    Among this band of enthusiastic but inexpert young engineers, Roy was also sent a draughtsman. After the failure of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, a sixteen-year-old Nottinghamshire boy with a sharp, intelligent face had sent samples of his landscape sketches to the Board of Ordnance. Its committeedid not consider Paul Sandby worthy of permanent employment, and a satirical sketch he later made of an Ordnance meeting, portraying its squabbles and prejudices, was probably fuelled by enduring hurt at this rejection. But the Board did offer Sandby ad hoc work in Scotland, and he began by assisting David Watson in the repair and construction of forts by producing large-scale military surveys of their immediate environs. These maps were clearly the product of a nascent landscape painter: Sandby surrounded his plans with meticulously detailed watercolours of the scenes that rendered the redcoats’ presence in the Highlands as natural as foliage.
    In 1749 Watson sent Sandby to work with Roy on the Military Survey. In his first year of this employment, the small team of map-makers spent some time surveying the area around Kinloch Rannoch, especially the road that Wade and his successors had built from Stirling to Crieff and Dalnacardoch. From Sandby’s surviving sketches, it seems that the scenery here appeared remarkably monochrome to the young draughtsman. And so it is, especially in cloudy weather: by the sides of Loch Rannoch, black mountains with snowy toupees stand as erect as pints of Irish stout. Fog clings to their sides like wisps of grey candyfloss, and the treacly loch is wrinkled by reflections of the trees that serrate its edges. Sandby spent some of his time there producing drawings of his teammates amid this muted Perthshire landscape.
    Paul Sandby made one particularly fascinating pen-and-ink and watercolour painting of a scene a mile or so east of the loch’s foot, on the banks of the River Tummel. Sandby’s View Near Loch Rannoch showed the ragtag bunch of young surveyors in action. On a flat plain against an arboreal background, through which the Tummel winds, two redcoated surveying assistants lay out a measuring chain; in the foreground one holds a staff, with a counterpart in the background; and three soldiers tend to the horses. Hunched over a circumferentor on a tripod is a man attired in a blue coat, and this is almost certainly a unique image of the young William Roy. But like the surveys he conducted for Watson, Sandby’s View was not an impartial representation. As a brilliant piece of visual propaganda, the young man’s sketch advertised the indomitable force of the King’s army. A craggy outcrop in the sketch’s middle-ground is locally known as Craig Varr and in Sandby’s painting it is being built over with soldiers’ lodgings, as part ofthe occupation of