Mapping British Earth and Sky

Abstract

In 1807 and 1808 the southern extremity of Cumberland, Captain William Mudge and his team of surveyors hauled hundreds of pounds of books, theodolite, scopes, and supplies atop Black Mountain. With its extensive view, the summit served as a primary station for one of the great triangles the national ordnance survey of Britain, the first of its kind executed with such precision and scale by any nation. After visiting Black the summer of 1811, William Wordsworth became interested local stories of Mudge's survey and wrote two poems honor of the triangulation atop the mountain, Written with a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb and its companion piece View from the Top of Black Comb (Wordsworth, Shorter Poems 518). The poems move between the technical sight of the surveyor and the artistic sight of the poet. From the summit, land and sea lie At the spectator's feet and Display august of man's inheritance / Of Britain's calm felicity and powerl (Vie w from the Top of Black Comb 23, 33-34). As Michael Wiley explains Romantic Geography, Wordsworth the Black poems provides a sense of Great Britain's political and geographical strength as enhanced by the survey which itself is supplemented by the cultural power of the poet's picturesque account of the venture (160-164). Yet, as Wiley also notes, the cartographic venture is undermined by a different sense of space at the close of Written with a Slate Pencil. In the final lines, darkness encloses the mountain top and prevents Mudge from seeing his map and the surrounding landscape. The mapmaker is left to confront nature without the primacy of sight, so crucial to his endeavors. Between the desires of the cartographer and those of the poet, nature takes on a variety of spatial representations, various means of mapping the real. Mapping the national ordnance survey of Great Britain transforms the overabundant information found in the field into abstract geometric patterns on paper. As those who issue and control maps create an ordering of affairs out of the sprawling terrain, Nature becomes a calculable sum. To plot a course between cities, to measure the amount of land held, to mark private property lines, to provide guidelines for tithing and taxes, brief, to mark lived transactions of a people, a country provides national, standardized maps. National maps constructed by a government serve the stability and longevity of a nation. Consequently, cartography provides a visible cipher for nationalism. The lines of a map mark objects as geographic realities as long as the map itself is taken as a transparent representation of the real. However, maps are also socially and technologically constructed signs. As Denis Wood The Power of Maps explains, Once it is acknowledged that the map creates these boundaries, it can no longer be accepted as representing these 'realities' which alone the map is capable of embodying (19). Cartography constructs the space it reads and doing so projects the mapmaker's desires onto the mapped space. By studying the creation of a national map of Great Britain the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, the political desires that inform the cartographic ordering of land become more evident. (1) Consider, for example, the case of General Roy who initiated designs for the first ordnance survey of Great Britain. Roy's ambition to map the whole of the nation began with his appointment as Assistant Quartermaster under General David Watson 1747. Their task was to produce maps of the rebellious Scottish Highlands that would aid civil and military control of the area (Roy 385-87). The Jacobite uprising of 1745 had brought Prince Charles and Highland chiefs under his command as far south as Derby their march toward London. The invading armies were beaten back to Scotland, but without adequate maps of the territory, the English troops were at a disadvantage. …