For those of us who enjoy collecting old maps, the study of those of Scotland is particularly rewarding because they contained so much that was inaccurate for so long. In 1734, John Cowley published a most unusual chart titled A Display of the Coasting Lines of Six Several Maps of North Britain which highlighted the fact that no one really knew the exact shape of Scotland. For example, in 1564, Mercator suggested that Cape Wrath and Faraid Head were one and the same place, thereby slicing off the north-west tip of Great Britain. For a period of over 100 years, other mapmakers happily followed Mercator’s lead. Even Timothy Pont’s remarkable one-man survey, which was carried out around 1600, and perhaps encompassed the whole of Scotland, failed to correct this error, and it remained a blemish on the maps of Blaeu, Gordon, Adair and Moll, to name but a few. It was left to a little-known minister, born in Kincardine, a man from the lowlands, to carry out a detailed survey of the entire north coast, a survey that was still being hailed and relied upon well into the 19th century.
The Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century was a remarkable period in the country’s history. Never was the contrast between the north and south greater: while in the lowlands men like David Hume and Adam Smith were leading the way in intellectual thinking, not just in Britain but also in Europe, the highlands remained a closed area. ‘To the Southern inhabitants of Scotland’, wrote Dr Johnson, ‘the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo or Sumatra. Of both they have only heard a little, and guess the rest’. The only road into the region to the north of Inverness was one that followed the east coast up to Thurso. There were no roads at all into the rest of Sutherland and Ross-shire until the early 19th century.
Shipping, of course, followed the north coast, but this involved the choice
