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inhabitants’ rebellious behaviour . Mountains and lochs formed natural barriers between clans, fostering a profound sense of community and dividing Highlanders from Lowland influence . One man felt that Highland chiefs were mirrors of their surroundings in more metaphorical ways too: both were useless, obstructive and terrifying. ‘Such Noble-men as these are like Barren Mountains , that bear neither Plants nor Grass for Publick Use,’ he wrote. ‘They touch the Skie, but are unprofitable to the Earth.’ Based on this assumption, Watson’s voice was heard, over and over again, passionately and articulately asserting ‘the Benefit [which] must arise from protecting the Highlands by the Regular Troops’ and the need to ‘acquir[e] a perfect knowledge of the Country’. Watson particularly sought to remedy the deficiency of geographical information about the Highlands under which the King’s army had suffered before, during and after the ‘Forty-Five’. Watson pointed out that his colleagues had ‘found themselves greatly embarassed for want of a proper Survey of the Country’ and he emphasised the vital need for a good map of Scotland to facilitate the opening up of hitherto inaccessible areas of the Highlands.
    Watson voiced his concerns persuasively to his commander, the Duke of Cumberland, who took the matter to his father, King George II. It was later reported that ‘the Inconvenience was perceived and the Resolution taken, for making a Compleat and accurate Survey of Scotland’. But Watson had no intention of trying to execute such a mission himself. Instead, he turned to a man over twenty years younger: a man with no evidence of formal training in map-making and apparently no history of military involvement. It was a curious choice, but it would prove inspired.
     
    T HE U PPER W ARD of Lanarkshire is a quiet region, composed of tightly wooded dells and lush fields. In the seventeenth century these tranquil slopes were the scene of violent clashes over the doctrine and organisation of the Scottish Church. Walter Scott’s novel Old Mortality depicted a Lanarkshire whose ‘broken glades’ and ‘bare hills of dark heath’had been as dreadfully rent by those civil wars as by the ancient geological upheavals that, millennia earlier, had created the ‘windings of the majestic Clyde’. In the wake of this century of turmoil, on 4 May 1726, a boy called William was born to Mary Stewart and her husband John Roy. Since the mid seventeenth century William Roy’s grandfather and then his father had been employed at the estates of Hallcraig and Milton in the Upper Ward. These lands were owned first by Sir William Gordon, the father of Robert Dundas’s wife Ann Gordon, and then by Ann’s brother, a rather obstreporous lawyer called Charles Hamilton Gordon. The Roys lived in a small cottage on these estates’ southern border called Miltonhead. This building and the estates’ two mansions have since disappeared and the land now houses the Carluke Golf Club and, until fairly recently, an intricate Gothic mansion called Milton-Lockhart, which was the sometime home of Walter Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, John Gibson Lockhart. 1
    The Roys were factors – land-stewards – and they managed the practical upkeep of the estates. An early-eighteenth-century guide to ‘the Duty and Office of a Land Steward’ described the many responsibilities of this position, which ranged from the relatively menial, such as trapping pests and catching poachers, to more onerous duties such as collecting tenants’ rents, preventing subletting and ensuring the land was adequately farmed. Surveying was a vital part of the jobs of Roy’s father and grandfather. ‘It is necessary,’ wrote one contemporary land-steward, ‘to know the quantity and quality of every parcel of land belonging to his lord’s estate’, and to do so he advised that the factor ‘should have a correct map of the whole … in which map, should be