Map Man

BBC 2,  6 Oct 2004,  30mins

Can modern explorer Nicholas Crane decipher the mysterious symbols of the medieval Gough Map and use them to lead him safely through some of the wildest Welsh landscapes of today?

The Map Man Episodes (Source)

 William Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland (1747-53)

After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the British Army decided it desperately needed an accurate map if it was to govern the rebellious Scottish Highlands. They gave a young military engineer, William Roy, the job. With the help of army volunteers, Nick Crane tests out the accuracy of Roy’s methods (using 18^th century chain traversing) and then follows one of Roy’s mapped roads across some of the most dangerous and exposed terrain in Scotland.  He even beds down for the night under a 17^th Century bridge at the top of the infamous Corrieyairick Pass, a place marked as “snug burrow” on Roy’s map.  He ends up at Rannoch Moor, where Roy’s road appears to run out, or does it? Can modern explorer, Nick Crane, travel across William Roy’s pioneering military map of 18^th Century Scotland, and use it to lead him safely through some of the wildest Highland landscapes of today?

 John Ogilby’s “Britannia” (1675)

Nick’s next mission is the first ever road atlas, published in 1675. By mountain bike, in mid-winter, he tries to follow Ogilby’s strip map route from York to Lancaster. He tries his hand at 17^th Century dimensuration (road surveying) and discovers along the way that old roads may fade away but, if you know what you’re looking for, they never disappear. 

 Harry Beck’s London Underground Map (1933)

It’s an icon of London, a design classic printed on everything from tee shirts to baseball caps, but the Underground Map started with one man working in his bedroom. Harry Beck was an electrical engineer and in 1931 he had a fit of genius when he realised that his circuit diagrams were a perfect model for a new map of the underground network. Nick Crane travels the tube to discover how he did it. Why did he exclude everything at street level? What dictated his choice of colour for each line? Is it the world’s favourite subway guide? Modern explorer, Nick Crane, deciphers Harry Beck’s revolutionary Underground Map of London, and explains why it changed the face of underground mapping, and travel, forever. Modern day designers of the map create a personal ‘Crane’ line for Nick and are even able to make the Thames disappear at the flick of a switch.

 The Gough Map of 1360 – The most original and accurate map of Britain.

Created in the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gough Map is both a real mystery and a landmark in map-making. It was still in use two hundred years after it was drawn. Who was the mapmaker and why was it made? Nick explores the mysterious red lines along the coast and questions why there is a massive green wilderness dominating the centre of the country. Can modern explorer Nick Crane decipher the mysterious symbols of the medieval Gough map and use them to lead him safely through some of the wildest Welsh landscapes of today?

 William Collins’ “Coasting Pilot” (1693) - the first systematic survey of British coasts

Before the late 1700s no sailor could fix his exact position on open sea. Instead ships sailed close to land, which gave them landmarks to recognise, but, in turn unfortunately increased their risk of shipwreck. Collins’ charts of the British coastline, published in 1693, saved hundreds of ships and lives. Nick Crane takes a journey on a square-rigger of the period to try and re-discover what Collins did. Is it possible today to use Collins’ chart to sail into a Cornish harbour?  And can Nick navigate his way across treacherous open sea to Eddystone Rock, using only 17^th century equipment and techniques? 

 William Smith’s Geological Map of England & Wales (1815)

No one thought rocks were very important until they studied Smith’s revolutionary, multi-coloured geological map of Britain. Years before Darwin, Smith overturned all the existing ideas about mineral prospecting, fossils and the origins of the earth. He demonstrated that the world was far older than people had thought. Nick Crane takes us on a fascinating investigation into how Smith arrived at his ideas, how he discovered that coal is always found in the company of particular fossils and that layers of different rock confirm that creation was not one event but a multi-million year process. On this arduous journey Nick explores why this map is much more than simply a cartographic masterpiece.

 Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England & Wales (1577)

In just five summers, Saxton produced the “first national atlas”, providing Elizabethans with thirty-four beautifully engraved, hand-coloured county maps.  But maps are created for all sorts of reasons and as Nick motorbikes across Norfolk (Saxton’s first map), he discovers that Saxton’s survey was as much about identifying possible political troublespots as rivers and windmills. Nick comes up with fascinating evidence that Norfolk was the heartland of Catholic conspiracy-making in the late 1500s. He also tries to solve the puzzle of Saxton’s amazing omission from his Norfolk map – the Norfolk Broads.

 Episode Eight: Martin Hotine’s Ordnance Survey (1935-1950)

The adventurer Nicholas Crane has explored the world on foot — and learnt to love maps along the way

The Sunday Times, September 12, 2004

Heaped on my desk are the 188 maps that once guided me across the mountain ranges of Europe, all the way from Cape Finisterre, in northwest Spain, to Istanbul, in Turkey. For 7,000 miles of solo walking through some of the most challenging wilderness on the continent, I depended on these folded sheets of paper and a small pocket compass. The maps are scuffed. Some have almost disintegrated, others are littered with jottings. Several are spattered with sardine oil. Some of them got me lost; one of them probably saved my life. Perhaps it’s no surprise that I returned home cherishing my battered map collection almost as dearly as my memories, and with a new appreciation of how these unpretentious documents have shaped the history of travel and travellers.

Maps are abbreviated geo-graphies. They reduce infinitely complex three-dimensional landscapes to coded pictures that can be absorbed at a glance. Among that stash on the desk, I can see the Spanish hiking sheet whose contour lines lured me through a raging storm to a conical mountain that turned out to be a gigantic conical depression. And the dog-eared Ukrainian map covered in numerals and arrows, compass bearings copied from a 1940s Soviet map I’d come across pinned to the wall of a mountain-rescue hut.

There are wads of avocado-tinted antique maps produced in the 1890s by Austro-Hungarian military surveyors, which led me through the Carpathian Mountains. More than a century old, they were all that I could find in Vienna that described the back country of eastern Europe. Using them demanded intuition and nerve.

For my new BBC series, Map Man, I’ve been feeling my way back through the history of British cartography; exploring the explorers who shaped it. Their ultimate legacy, perhaps, is today’s Ordnance Survey Landranger series, whose 1:50,000 scale allows users to read every mountain gradient and every curve of a valley, and whose menu of symbols identifies sand dunes, battlefields, motorways and public conveniences.

Originally surveyed by teams of men with theodolites and chains, these large-scale maps have been designed to guide every species of traveller through unfamiliar terrain. Among the Landranger users we encountered while filming Map Man were hikers, cyclists and the navigators of RAF Tornados. Bombing runs are plotted on the map that you and I would use to plan a picnic.

THE USE of maps to find the way is a relatively recent phenomenon. Back in the Middle Ages, maps had to be drawn by hand, and the few that have survived were far too inaccurate to be of use on the road.

The Gough map of 1360 — arguably the most important medieval map of Britain — was a haphazard combination of Arthurian legend, coasting charts, travellers’ itineraries and astronomical fixes. The edges of the Gough map are ragged with holes, for this was a map that spent much of its life fixed to a wall. It was a reference map for kings and ministers: at a glance, it was possible to see where the population centres of England were located, and which bits of coast were exposed to invasion. Blank areas such as the interior of Wales were not just unmapped, but — in the era of Welsh revolt — carried the unwritten warning “Here be dragons!”.

Until the 1700s, most travellers had to rely on local advice to get from one town or village to the next. This is a much more reliable means of travel than it sounds. When my cousin and I rode bicycles across Tibet and the Gobi, we carried just one map: a US “Air Defense” sheet characterised by vast areas of empty brown and yellow. The map gave our general whereabouts in Asia, but to find our way across plateau and desert, we asked the locals.

The technique we devised was probably similar to those used by medieval wayfarers: we would stand at a junction and ask the way to the place we had just left; if given the correct answer, we’d ask the way to the place we wanted to reach.

The blanks on the maps of Britain took many hundreds of years to fill. The first systematic survey of England and Wales was undertaken by a Yorkshireman, Christopher Saxton, and led to his celebrated county atlas of 1579. The scale was still too small to be of any use to a traveller, and the blanks between towns and villages were large enough to hide enormous geographical features such as the Norfolk Broads.

Saxton tamed the counties, but not the landscapes. Maps, wrote Elizabeth I’s cartographically minded adviser John Dee, were bought by collectors “to beautifie their Halls, Parlers, Chambers, Galeries, Studies, or Libraries”. They were helpful in locating “thinges past, as battels fought, earthquakes, heavenly fyringes, & such occurentes”, and were essential for comparing the “large dominion of the Turke” with the “litle morsell” of Christendom. As an afterthought, Dee added that maps might be useful “to understand of other mens travailes” or “for their owne iorneyes directing into farre landes”.

Roads began to appear on English maps at the end of the 1500s, but it was not until 1675 that a colourful Restoration entrepreneur gave British travellers a taste of the maps they needed. Over a period of five years, John Ogilby — who had been appointed Royal Cosmo-grapher for the purpose — dispatched teams of surveyors with calibrated wheels to measure the post roads of England and Wales. Bound in leather, Ogilby’s Britannia was Britain ’s first road atlas, with 200 pages of description and 100 pages of strip maps at a scale of one inch to the mile — a travellers’ scale that permitted fords, bridges, blacksmiths’ forges and inns to appear so precisely that journey times could be anticipated with unprecedented accuracy. Unfortunately, Britannia weighed a monstrous 17lb, and was so expensive that most copies became curiosities in Resto- ration libraries.

But Ogilby had opened the door to independent leisure travel in Britain. By the early 1700s, pocket editions of Britannia were pouring onto the market. For the first time, a traveller could move from town to town without relying on local advice. Although the new road books described only main thoroughfares, they connected remote, romantic backwaters of Britain with London and unleashed a cavalcade of adventurous travel writers.

The indefatigable horsewoman Celia Fiennes was followed by Daniel Defoe. And then, in 1773, Dr Johnson and James Boswell took off on their celebrated expedition to the Hebrides, to “contemplate a system of life almost totally different from what we had been accustomed to see; and to find simplicity and wildness” — the same sentiments that entice modern Britons to Bhutan.

These were difficult journeys. British back roads were rough and dusty in summer and quagmires in winter, and they were mostly unmapped. Adventurous wri-ters had a field day. Books such as William Cobbett’s Rural Rides and George Borrow’s Wild Wales introduced Britons to regions beyond the reach of cartography.

Yet maps were still not an essential item of travellers’ luggage: Francis Galton’s en- cyclopaedic The Art of Travel was published as late as

1855, and contained instructions for building coracles and converting one’s turban into an emergency rope. There is no advice on the procuring or reading of maps, but there is a section devoted to exploring and surveying — intrepid travellers of the 19th century drew their own maps.

In Britain, at least, everything changed in 1870, when the Ordnance Survey completed the mapping of England and Wales at a scale of one inch to the mile. Scotland followed in 1887; colour was added to the one-inch maps in 1897; and the first tourist map, covering Snowdon, was published in 1920. Nowadays, OS maps can be found in post offices and local shops from Land’s End to Cape Wrath. For £6, anyone can buy an accurate, incredibly detailed snapshot of a big chunk of Britain. Your passport to leisure travel has never been more affordable.

Nicholas Crane maps the maps, talks the talk, and walks the walks of cartographic history.

NICHOLAS CRANE is a world map expert and one of Britain’s foremost adventurers. In Map Man, a brand new series exclusive to BBC Two, he explores eight of the most ingenious, revolutionary and exciting maps in British cartographic history. In this engaging series, Nicholas Crane reminds us of a time when our knowledge of maps was far from commonplace as we go from the earliest and most mysterious map in the series, from the time of Chaucer, through to what has been described as ‘the most outstandingly successful practical map of all time’ - The London Underground Map.

Armed with a combination of ancient drawings, modern carto-technology, and of course his trusty umbrella walking stick, Nick uses the tools of his trade to discover how mapmakers have charted mountains, shrunk oceans to measurable drops and reduced sprawling cities to navigable diagrams. Covering the whole of Britain by foot, horseback, four-wheel drive, bicycle, tube train, motorbike, canal-boat and sailing ketch, Nick circumnavigates Wales, treks Scottish peaks and Norfolk fens, tramps the Pennines, meanders through the West Country and burrows deep beneath London’s City streets.

Nicholas Crane is a rare combination: he’s an expert cartographer and an international explorer with a charisma that brings his personal obsession alive. In 1986 he was part of a two-man team which identified for the first time the geographical Pole of Inaccessibility in Central Asia. In 1992-3 he walked alone for 18 months along the entire mountain watershed of Europe, describing this epic adventure in his award-winning book Clear Waters Rising. His next book, Two Degrees West, was an account of his walk down Britain’s central meridian, and was published to great acclaim in 1999. Nicholas’ most recent book was his biography of the world’s first modern, scientific cartographer, the Flemish-born, 16th-century genius Gerard Mercator. Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet, was published in 2002.