Charting New Territory
After quashing no less than three Jacobite Risings – 1715, 1719 and 1745 – it was safe to say the British government had had enough of these rebels north of the border. The Duke of Cumberland gave orders to rout them out once and for all, but he soon ran into difficulty. Jacobite clansman had been raised in the rugged, wild Highlands, and knew the secret caves and hiding spots very well.
The frustrated Duke soon found himself greatly embarrassed as his troops foundered in the moors without adequate maps, and lost the trail of the Bonnie Prince entirely.
He petitioned for a Military Survey of Scotland, which was promptly given a royal decree – his father, after all, was King George II. William Roy, from Miltonhead near Carluke, was given the unenviable task of mapping the 78,772 km (30,414 sq mi) country in a military survey. He was 21 years old.
In 1755, after eight years of work, he produced the Great Map, or Roy’s Map of Scotland, at a scale of 1:36 000 (1.75 inches to a mile). The map opened up the Highlands and paved the way for the expansion of General Wade’s military roads that still crisscross the country. Roy went on to map England’s south coast, and had plans for the rest of the country.
He stated the “honour of the nation” depended on creating a map that was “greatly superior in point and accuracy” of the entire British Isles. While he died in 1790 without seeing his vision fulfilled, his early work inspired the Trigonometrical Survey by the Board of Ordnance – now the Ordnance Survey.