Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt
There is nothing like the Ordnance Survey map, nothing to rival it, certainly nothing to beat it. It has survived the winds of change and the changes of fashion with its splendour undimmed. Like pubs and post boxes and milk vans, it pleases us with its usefulness and as a symbol of the kind of people we are. As Rachel Hewitt observes in her extremely well written account of the origin of the OS map, 'the national mapping agency has established a secure place in the affections of the modern British public‟. I would go further. Life without it is unimaginable.
After the crushing of Bonnie Prince Charlie‟s 1745 uprising, the King‟s men were intent on subduing the unruly Scottish Highlands whence so much trouble had sprung. Their problem was finding the unruly Highlanders in a largely unmapped wilderness of mountain and bog.
A young man called William Roy who was adept in the use of the astrolabe and the plane table and the theodolite. He began by measuring the road from Fort Augustus to Inverness, Roy and his team proceeded to lug their gear across the land for months on end, devoured by midges, sweating in their woollen uniforms, exhausted by the unforgiving terrain.
Later came the Revolution and Napoleon, and a the threat of invasion. The need to know where we were, and where the fiendish French might come from, became urgent.
Insofar as Hewitt‟s story has a hero, that hero is William Mudge. His distinctly unheroic name, and its rhyming possibilities, are appropriate to the character of the great enterprise. It was Mudge who plotted the triangles across southern England, Mudge who oversaw their translation into maps, Mudge who supervised the incredibly laborious business of printing them, Mudge who officiated on January 1, 1801 at the publication of the first instalment.
It was to be another 69 years before the final sheet in the so-called First Series, that of south-west Northumberland, appeared, by which time Mudge and his successor, Thomas Colby – another in the mould of workaholic visionaries – were both dead.
Rachel Hewitt‟s story ends in 1870. By its nature it is a story lacking in drama: no sex, very little scandal or danger, a great deal of trudgery and drudgery (not to mention Mudgery). She strives valiantly to bring her trigonometricians, draughtsmen and triangulists to life, with variable success. Where she succeeds wholly is in explaining what they had to do, and in honouring their remarkable determination.
There is an army of us with reason to be grateful for the exertions of Mudge and company and their successors. As Hewitt points out, the OS map fires the imagination while dealing with the practicalities of finding your way about.

(Reviewer) Malcolm Walters