Summary
LOOK UP Culloden on the Military Survey of Scotland, carried out between 1747 and 1755, and you can see the rise of Culloden Moor and the green parkland surrounding Culloden House, painstakingly drawn at what was then the relatively large scale of 1,000 yards to the inch. Oddly, perhaps, there is no reference to the battle which, just a year before the mapmakers embarked upon their mammoth task, had brought down the Jacobite cause and shattered Gaeldom and the clan system - although William Roy, the cartographical genius behind the "Great Map", had marked both Killiecrankie and Falkirk as battle sites, and both had been Jacobite victories.
Today William Roy, the Lanarkshire-born surveyor who was just 20 when he started mapping Scotland back in these tumultuous times, is regarded as the father of the Ordnance Survey. There is a distinct irony in the fact that the OS and other maps we take for granted when exploring our country have their origins amid the often brutal "pacification" of the rebellious Highlands.See the full content of this document
Extract
Return of the Map
But only now can the scale of Roy's achievement be fully appreciated, as the Edinburgh publisher Birlinn has just issued the entire map in a bound facsimile edition - the first time it has been published since it was completed two and a half centuries ago. It has also become accessible online, following a collaboration between the National Library of Scotland and the Britis...
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