An A to Z of the mapping of these islands

CARTOGRAPHY: WILLIAM J SMYTHreviews Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Surveyby Rachel Hewitt, Granta, 436pp, £25

'MAPPING" HAS BECOME one of the great metaphors of this age. Running parallel to this trend has been a renewed interest in the history of mapping. Rachel Hewitt's Map of a Nationis a valuable addition to this genre. Her Biography of the Ordnance Survey, is a lively, well-written and carefully researched evocation of how the landscapes of Britain (and Ireland) came to be revealed with such dramatic precision.

This book is a celebration of the technical instruments and skills involved in the making of OS maps: it provides superb insights into the institutions and social networks that generated the innovations, political clout or both needed to push the mapping agenda forward; and illuminates the biographies of the heroic figures involved in the extraordinary project of mapping these islands. To the benefit of the lay reader, Hewitt communicates clearly about, and provides apt illustrations of, the functions of cartographic instruments: the alidade, Gunter’s chain and, particularly, that very British invention, the theodolite. The primary importance of baseline measurements is highlighted. Here Jesse Ramsden’s wonderfully inventive Great Theodolite – with its two telescopes plus a brass circle, about three feet in diameter, and an engraved scale boasting divisions down to about 1/24000 of an inch – came into play. With the help of six maps, Hewitt stresses the centrality of triangulation in this mapping saga. All of this may sound a little technical, but it is crucial to emphasise how central this kind of scientific-cum-technical expertise was and is to British identity and its sense of achievement.

A striking feature of Hewitt’s narrative is how a number of stages in the evolution of Ordnance mapping capabilities are celebrated by social events on site, as, for example, the widely reported, exciting visit of King George III and his entourage to the Hounslow Heath baseline as it was completed in 1784 to initiate the Paris-Greenwich triangulation. Hewitt also reveals the galaxy of military, scientific and artistic institutions that advanced the cause of the Ordnance Survey. The Royal Military Academy and its Corps of Engineers, Royal Academy of Arts, Society for the Encouragement of Arts and, most significantly, the Royal Society (whose founding members included Ireland’s greatest map-maker, William Petty) were all key institutions. They provided stimulating environments for the exploration of new and exciting ideas about the process of mapping.

For Hewitt the three great figures in the development of the Ordnance Survey are William Roy, William Mudge and Thomas Colby. Son of a Lanarkshire land surveyor, Roy was a beneficiary of Scottish military and landed elites. He was put in charge of the Military Survey of Scotland after the Battle of Culloden (1746), highlighting that maps were, and still are, often used to impose military domination over a subjugated people. A fellow of the Royal Society and a respected member of London’s scientific communities, Roy had a vision to create an accurate, “superior” map of all of Britain. It was Roy’s friendship with Charles Lennox, third duke of Richmond, that saw his dream realised. As master of the Board of Ordnance, Lennox secured in June 1791 “the consent of the King, who had been fond of the Scottish map-maker, to proceed with the Trigonometrical Operation begun by the late Major-General Roy”.

Under Mudge’s direction the first official Ordnance Survey map – that of the county of Kent – was published on January 1st, 1801. Mudge came from a talented Devonshire clan that included scientific instrument-makers and a father who was a close friend of Joshua Reynolds. Mudge set out to popularise the OS maps and make them generally available to the public. He was acutely aware of the OS as a “defender” and “definer” of an “island nation”. It was he who picked Thomas Colby to succeed him – and Colby brings us to the Irish Ordnance Survey.

A passionate lover of the outdoors, Colby was a highly disciplined perfectionist with a fiery temper. The six-inch mapping of Ireland is regarded as this military engineer’s greatest achievement. In this he was ably assisted by the cool, organised Thomas Larcom – in my view the greatest geographer-engineer of 19th-century Ireland. Hewitt provides an insightful synopsis of the Irish Ordnance Survey story. A lively portrait of that “irreverent linguist” John O’Donovan emerges. Unlike some Irish commentators, Hewitt correctly infers that O’Donovan’s consciousness of his cultural-broker role in this complex mapping enterprise was rather subtle. Her judgment that “in the Ordnance Survey, O’Donovan appears to have seen an opportunity to resurrect the face of the nation as it appeared before the arrival of the English and the ensuing traumatic history of plantation” also seems sound. Larcom’s implementation of the ill-fated parish memoir series and his interest in Irish toponymy in turn reveal a motivation more intellectual than commercial. As Larcom observed, “to trace all the mutations of each [place] name would be in fact to pass in review the local history of the whole country”.

Hewitt is a superb fieldworker. In her narrative she consistently asks us to imagine Roy, Mudge and Colby as they survey the land. In these poetic passages she faithfully recites the names of all the places in their “viewfinders”. Clearly, the work of the British Ordnance Survey was a nation-building exercise. Hewitt’s writings reinforce this nationalising exercise. Although her romantic sympathies incline her to accept other kinds of truths, nevertheless she regularly affirms “the truth of the map”. Her celebration of the OS maps may have obscured a perspective that maps are simplified abstractions of complex worlds and that maps may privilege certain cultures, class groups and institutions in their representations. Hewitt is aware that place names constitute a contested domain. Yet her regular use of the name “British Isles” does not recognise the imperial reach of this term. I would have preferred had she used “Britain and Ireland”.

Nevertheless, she is a fair-minded writer, sensitive to the cultural and ethnopolitical issues consequent on 19th-century Britain’s quasi-federal structure. The title of the book seems strange until Hewitt notes that when the final six-inch map of Ireland was published, in 1846, “the Ordnance Survey had produced a map of a nation. But it was not the nation that it had originally set out to map”. The First Series of the one-inch maps for England and Wales was not finished until 1870. As it had been in the mid 17th century, colonial Ireland had once again become the best-mapped nation in Europe.

William J Smyth is author of Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c 1530-1750(Cork University Press) and editor, with John Crowley and Michael Murphy, of the forthcoming Atlas of the Great Famine 1845-1852