Authorizing landscape: «authority», naming and the Ordnance Survey's mapping of the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century

Abstract

A range of work in human and historical geography has discussed naming and mapping as reflections of social power. In historical contexts in particular, attention has been drawn to the ways in which native knowledges, even the natives themselves, were either «written out» by being excluded, or marginalized in the processes of «translation» and cartographic representation. This article examines the work of the Ordnance Survey in the nineteenth-century Scottish Highlands and the means this English-speaking body employed in providing authoritative names to what was, in placenames and in the language of the inhabitants, a Gaelic landscape. An examination of the Ordnance Survey's Original Object Name Books is used to explore how the landscape was «authorized», to discuss who was judged an authoritative source and, from this, to emphasize naming as a social process.