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the Highlands. Sandby’s View also shows locals in plaid kilts and trews assisting the military engineers, possibly translators or guides or maybe just interested bystanders. Either way, the map-makers appear to have successfully converted the Highlanders to Enlightenment science and the Army’s presence in Scotland.
    What Sandby decided not to paint in his View was almost as telling. To the map-makers’ backs, entirely ignored in the young man’s watercolour, lies the best view in the entire region of a vast, symmetrical mountain called Schiehallion, which resembles an indelicate Mount Fuji. It may seem strange that a cartographic draughtsman chose to ignore such an aesthetically fascinating scene. But a background featuring Schiehallion would have dwarfed the surveyors, making their task to map the whole Scottish mainland appear comically absurd. Sandby’s View Near Loch Rannoch was an image consciously constructed to demonstrate the might of the Hanoverian military and its relatively tame backdrop shows his colleagues clearly in control. Furthermore, the particular region in which Sandby set his View was scarred by a traumatic recent history of anti-Jacobite violence. Four miles north lay a Hanoverian barracks from which redcoats had descended on the surrounding area in the aftermath of the 1745 Rebellion, seizing Jacobite estates, executing Highland criminals and razing buildings to the ground. Sandby’s painting was a barefaced celebration of Hanoverian power, its composition and location consciously chosen to reinforce that message. Displaying such an acute awareness of the political power of art and landscape, it is small wonder that in the decades following the Military Survey of Scotland Paul Sandby enjoyed a short spell producing satirical political cartoons. He also helped found the Royal Academy of Art (an institution designed to promote a ‘British school’ of painting), and pursued a career as a nationalist landscape painter – his obituary called him the ‘father of English watercolour’.
     
    I N THE THREE years that followed the formation of this small and inexperienced map-making team, its members surpassed all expectations. Theyworked on a standard pattern for surveyors that saw the men ‘in the field’ during the spring and summer months, when the days were long, the temperatures moderate, the winds and storms not too frequent or fierce, and the light bright. David Watson paid regular visits to his charges, reporting on their progress to the Board of Ordnance’s senior officers in London. In autumn and winter the map-makers retreated to Scotland’s capital where, in the Governor’s House of Edinburgh Castle, they collated their measurements of the roads and waterways and their sketches and informed guesses about the intervening landscape to construct the intricate maps that comprise the Highland sheets of the Military Survey of Scotland.
    The climate and topography of what Watson termed the most ‘remote Corners of the Highlands’ were a consistent challenge throughout this epic enterprise. The young men’s notebooks, journals and correspondence during the project have not survived, but Sandby made an etching that captured the daily tribulations of Roy and his map-makers. He showed a small party huddled at the base of a treacherous mountain pass, raddled by gales, pitting themselves futilely against the forces of nature in their most extreme manifestation . In the repeated soakings that the men endured, their woollen uniforms must have become a heavy burden. Seventy years after the Military Surveyors’ extraordinary tramp across Scotland, the Ordnance Survey followed in their footsteps. From one map-maker’s descriptions of his ordeal, we can get some idea of the arduousness of his predecessors’ experiences. This man described ‘the really laborious part of the business’, that of ‘ conveying the camp equipage, instruments and stores’ across the violently undulating landscape.