Genius Fan

I’ve got the Eighteenth century disease. It’s not smallpox, TB or gonnorhea. It’s the one when your brain is on alert for four digit numbers beginning with 17. I was at the supermarket recently and the assistant said, “That’ll be seventeen forty five, please.” I almost didn’t hear her. My mind went off on one about the great Jacobite rising of that year, 1745. It happened again the other day while my wife and I were sitting on the concrete benches in the scruffy little micro-plaza at the end of Carluke High Street. She was sipping a soft drink and I was chowing down on a chicken bake from Greggs the Baker. Absentmindedly, I was scanning the scene in front of me when my brain, in pattern-recognition mode, started making out the number 17 on the concrete bench opposite, about 20m away. I wasn’t paying attention, but my brain was alert and it picked out the number 1726, carved in digits 10cm tall. A couple of seconds later I started to focus and that’s when I saw another number: 1790. I blurted out to my wife: “Look! The Eighteenth century!”

Crouching down next to the bench I was able to make out the words carved into the front of the bench: “Major General William Roy, born Miltonhead, Carluke, 1726-1790”. Two little plaques on the top of the bench at the corners explained. One of them gave the briefest biography of Roy as a military engineer, surveyor and “instigator of the Ordnance Survey map and grid of Britain.” That’s pretty important. And he was born near to the town of Carluke in South Lanarkshire. In the recent and excellent book Old Ways, New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720-1832, we learn that the “Duke of Cumberland’s campaign of terror following Culloden was followed by a whole set of pacifying and ‘improving’ measures, including William Roy’s ‘Great Map’ commission.” The Great Map was a huge undertaking in mapping out Highland and Lowland Scotland. The NationaL Library of Scotland has digitised the Great Map and you can experience a bit of time travel zooming in and out of a landscape dating from 1750. This is a fascinating story when you start to dig in…more than I can put here. It turns out that artist Paul Sandby accompanied Roy on his mapmaking trips and contributed sketches to the project. Roy also had an interest in Scottish antiquities and in 1755 compiled his maps of the Roman forts on the Antonine Wall (four of his Roman fort maps are to be found on the other plaque on the Carluke bench). If you look hard enough you’ll see the Eighteenth century is all around us.

Notes
Old Ways, New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720-1832, (ed) Bonehill, Dulau Beveridge and Leask (2021)