Everyone loves a map but where did they come from?

An introduction to Scottish maps and map making

Most good journeys start with a map¹, but first we should consider where the maps came from and what limits there are to using them to interpret the landscape of today.

This introduction should not be considered as exhaustive or definitive but consider it a source of discussion, enlightenment or an entertaining distraction.

Early Maps

The earliest² map of Scotland is from a book called Geography by the polymath Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 90 – c. AD 168) who was a Greek-Roman citizen of Egypt. His book discusses the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. Unfortunately there are no surviving contemporary copies of the book and the map illustrated here is from a 17^th century copy (Illustration 1).

Illustration 1: The Ptolemy map is the earliest known depiction of Scotland in a map.

The main thing is that it is recognisable as what we would consider to be a map. Although not great on detail or accuracy compared to the maps of today, he showed great skill in tackling the problem of projecting the curved world on to a flat surface. This attempt at portraying the world with a degree of geographical accuracy was not continued in the coming years.

Medieval maps.

Early maps were the creation in varying degrees of tradesmen as well as craftsmen, and of artists as much as scientific surveyors. Medieval land surveying was concerned primarily with written rather than graphic description and with valuation rather than exact measurement³. Compare the work of Ptoleomy with those of much later and you will see a more unscientific representation of the world (Illustration 2).

Illustration 2: World map c1265. This map is one of the most important surviving examples of 13th-century map-making. Jerusalem is in the centre of the map, and the whole world is looked upon by Christ who is attended by angels. This shows that medieval people looked at geography in relation to the Bible and to earth’s creation by God. But the map also shows an interest in local places: you can see the British Isles, and the rivers Thames and Severn. London is marked with a gold dot. The map was not intended, like a modern atlas, to guide someone in their travels, but to show important places in an overall prospect. http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item99816.html

One of the most realistic maps of the medieval period was by a Saint Albans monk called Matthew Paris c1250, he has the basic shape of Britain correct but with Scotland shown as an island (Illustration 3). He was perhaps the first medieval mapmaker to try to portray the actual physical appearance of the country rather than just represent the relationship between places in simple diagrams.

Illustration 3: Matthew Paris map of Britain, c.1250 Copyright © The British Library Board

By 1560 the Italians had made quite a recognisable map of Scotland (Illustration 4).

Illustration 4: Italian Map of Scotland 1560

County maps.

With one or two exceptions, there are no separate maps of the regions of Britain before Elizabethan times but from Elizabethan to mid Victorian times the county was always the basic unit of regional mapping⁴. The county maps have there own set of problems when they are used as an aid to historical detection. J B Harley states:

'County maps can seldom (if ever) be regarded as a definitive or completely up to date record of topography for the time of their production.'⁵.

The cost of the survey would have to be borne by interested parties such as the gentry and this, plus the interests of the surveyor, could influence what got included in the map and what got left out.

Since the maps of the time were often a commercial venture, there was a bias towards well populated areas which were mapped more often and in more detail than remoter areas. In fact the act of surveying and map making was an expensive business and many of the map makers ran into financial difficulties. This can lead to difficulties with dating maps of this period since it was cheaper to re-engrave an earlier map with little or no resurveying done but give the publishing date not the surveying date.

However, the county maps produced by private surveyors between 1760 and 1840 are the most detailed maps of rural areas of Scotland up until the end of the 19^th century⁶.

County maps showed perhaps for the last time, a degree of artistry (Illustration 5) and ornamentation that is not present in the maps produced today. These county maps have now found a new use as an object of art and are often seen hanging on the wall of many a country pub.

Illustration 5: William Forrest Map of Haddingtonshire 1799

Uniformity and Precision

Accurate surveying of the country required systems of very large triangles, called triangulation networks. In trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end of a fixed baseline, rather than measuring distances to the point directly. A mesh of triangles at the largest appropriate scale is established first. Points inside the triangles can all then be accurately located with reference to it.

Britain could not have a complete accurate survey of the country without a full triangulation and the cost of this could not be provided for by private subscribers, but would need to be funded by the government.

The need for uniform, accurate maps, of the whole kingdom related everywhere to one national triangulated framework, was brought into sharp focus by the seemingly unconnected events of the Jacobite Rebellion of the 1700s.

Dukes and military maps

The battle of Culloden in April 1746 highlighted the need for accurate maps. The best map available at the time was of a scale of 1 inch to 13.5 miles or 1:855360, which was too small for the detail needed by military commanders⁷.

Lieutenant Colonel David Watson put forward the proposal for a survey to the Duke of Cumberland who gained authority for it from his father George II. The King was keen to provide any assistance with the pacification of the highlands.

The responsibility for the military survey of Scotland was delegated to William Roy and was completed by 1755. Roy then promoted the idea of a complete triangulation of Britain as a basis for more accurate mapping.

Roy died in 1790 and it took the Duke of Richmond to champion the cause of the complete triangulation. The Duke was the Master General of His Majesty's Ordnance and it was he who initiated the Trigonometrical Survey which was later to become known as the Ordnance Survey. Ordnance is the department responsible for military stores and equipment, hence the rather odd title of the British National Survey Organisation⁸.

Ordnance Survey

The primary triangulation of Scotland started in 1814 but it wasn't until 1859 that most of the Scottish lowlands were complete. Although the initial mapping of England and Wales had been undertaken at the one-inch scale,the growing need for detailed maps for land valuation, registration and conveyancing, agricultural improvement, mineral development, railways, together with the facts of urban expansion, lent advantage to the more detailed mapping at 24" to 26" to the mile scales. However, the successful mapping of Ireland at the six-inch scale had lead to the decision to follow this in the 1840s in Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Scotland⁹.

However accurate maps might be in trigonometrical terms, they were valueless as records of property ownership and guides to taxation without agreed names. Where a place may have more than one name or many spellings, the surveyors would consult an authority in the local populous. The 'Authority' of an individual usually followed a class or professional hierarchy. Here is an example of the detailed advice given to surveyors regarding authority and names:

'For the name of a house, farm, park or wood, or other part of an estate the owner is the best authority. For names generally the following are the best individual authorities and should be taken in the order given: Owners of property; estate agents; clergymen, postmasters and schoolmasters, if they have been some time in the district; rate collectors; borough and county surveyors; gentlemen residing in the district; Local Government Board Orders; local histories; good directories. Respectable inhabitants of some position should be consulted. Small farmers and cottagers are not to be depended on, even for the names of the places they occupy, especially as to the spelling. But a well-educated and independent occupier is, of course, a good authority'¹⁰.

Map Production

The six-inch maps of Scotland were engraved on special hammered copper, 1/10th inch thick and measuring 26.5 by 38.5 inches in extent. After scoring the sheet lines and marking the position of trigonometrical stations with fine dots, the plates were covered with wax, the outlines copied from tracings, and then cut into the plate in reverse using a graver or burin. Map engraving was a highly specialised process, and took a long time with high quality results. In time the engravers became the highest paid branch of the Survey.

A copper plate could only make about 500 impressions before re-engraving or copying by electrotyping was required.

Ordnance Survey Today

The laborious task of re-triangulating Britain was undertaken in the mid 20^th century using a new set of triangulation pillars and up to date theodolites. However this technology was responsible for laying down a firm foundation on which to build a more accurate map of Britain it was made redundant with the revolution in map making that came with digital age.

The modern Ordnance Survey map is produced by state-of-the-art satellite technology and theodolite 'total stations' with lasers to measure distances. The national network of around 100 base stations constantly transmit their GPS-observed positions to a central processing hub¹¹. The survey control network of 'trig' pillars was accurate to 20 metres over the entire length of Great Britain. Today the receivers that make up the OS Net network are coordinated to an accuracy of just 3 mm over the same area¹².

Information gathered by ground staff is complemented by an intensive programme of aerial photography which is viewed in 3D.The resulting high-definition images, which show detail as sharp as the pattern of road markings, can then be overlaid with existing map data to check where features have changed so that instant updates can be recorded.

The new information from both ground and air surveys is added to the OS MasterMap database. The result is a definitive digital picture of Britain’s geography and the largest database of its kind anywhere in the world, made up of almost half a billion features.

So now we have the most accurate maps ever produced, and this introduction may read simply as a history of improvements in accuracy over time, ending up with present day maps that are best of all. However, does this mean that the more accurate maps are 'better' maps? Perhaps for certain uses they indeed are but they don't tell us as much about the landscape of the past and the peoples relationship to it, as the old maps do. However what they do provide is an accurate (for today's standard) baseline from which to measure changes in the future or perhaps they will be dismissed by the people of the future as artistic but sort of infantile compared to the wonders of the future.

References

1All of the maps come from the National Library of Scotland unless otherwise stated.

2http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-15008220

3Harley,J. B., 1972. Maps for the Local Historian. ISBN 719908345: page 6.

4Harley,J. B., 1972. Maps for the Local Historian. ISBN 719908345: page 67.

5Harley,J. B., 1972. Maps for the Local Historian. ISBN 719908345: page 72.

6 http://maps.nls.uk/browse.html

7 Dickinson, G. B., 1969. Maps and Air Photographs. ISBN 71315425x, Page 4.

8Dickinson, G. B., 1969. Maps and Air Photographs. ISBN 71315425x,Page 45.

9Fleet, C. and Withers, C.,Ordnance Survey Maps - Six-inch 1st edition, Scotland, 1843-1882: A Scottish paper landscape. National Library of Scotland.(http://maps.nls.uk/os/6inch/os_info1.html).

10Seymour, W A (ed.) 1980.A history of the Ordnance Survey, Page 180.

11http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/about-us/our-history/index.html

12http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/?s=Thorney+Gale&x=12&y=2

Prehistoric burials of the East Lothian coast

Prehistoric Burials

Scotland’s prehistory stretched for some 9500 years from the earliest settlers to around AD 1000. There was some written history during the last thousand years of that period, but so little that it was effectively still a prehistoric era, and we rely upon archaeology to provide details of how people treated their dead. I should note at this point that these are not the normal everyday people but people whose remains for some reason were treated in an exceptional way; in a way that provides us archaeological evidence. The majority of the people are not archaeologically visible. Their remains used in a way that rendered their decomposition complete. We will only be concerned here with the sites that have left physical evidence.

So let us now go in search of what remains of the prehistoric burials of the coast of East Lothian.

Barrows: Ancient burial mounds.

The earliest formal burials in Scotland that we know about, and which involved any kind of grave structure, took place after about 4000 BC. These took the form of a chambered tomb which were often constructed form large stones or as was the case in lowland Scotland, timber, turf and earthⁱ. Into these tombs would be placed the decomposed and disarticulated remains of the deceased. The chambered tomb was then covered with a mound of earth or a stone cairn. The later mounds were often round in shape but the earliest were long and rectangular. Evidence for such long barrows in our area of interest can be found (Table 1) near Luffness Mains (NE47 NE5) (illustration 1)and Aberlady (NT47 NE1).

RCAHMS SITE NUMBER	LOCATION OF FIND	SITE TYPE
NT47NW 1	Aberlady Parish	BARROW(S), CIST, LONG CIST(S)
NT47NE 1	Aberlady, St Mary's Chapel	BURIAL GROUND, CHAPEL, CIST(S), CROSS SLAB
NT48SE 1.01	Luffness House	CIST(S)
NT48SE 4	Luffness House	CIST
NT48NE 1	Gullane Links	CAIRN(S)
NT48SE 21	Gullane Sands	CINERARY URN, MOULD (CLAY)
NT48NE 6	Gullane Links	LONG CIST
NT48SE 19	Gullane Golf Course	LONG CIST(S)
NT48SE 24	Gala Law	CINERARY URN
NT48SE 53	Gala Law	BURIAL
NT48SE 5	Kilspindie Golf Course	CIST(S)
NT47NW 7	Longniddry Golf Course	CIST(S), BEAKER, CINERARY URN(S)
NT48SE 14	Park Hills (West Fenton)	CIST
NT58NW 6	West Links (not far from the Eel Burn)	CIST(S), CINERARY URN(S)
NT77NW 16	Broxmouth (Dunbar)	BURIAL(S), CIST(S)

Table 1: Prehistoric burials of the East Lothian coast

Illustration 1: Luffness Mains: RCAHMS Aerial Photography Digital Oblique aerial view of the cropmarks of the settlement and barrows, taken from the E. DP070181 Copyright RCAHMSImage


However, these sites have not been explored in any detail. For a well excavated site we have to go to Eweford near Dunbar, which was thoroughly excavated and revealed evidence of burial practice relating to this time period. Archaeological excavations were carried out between 2001 and 2004, in preparation for the upgrading of the A1 to dual carriageway between Haddington and Dunbar. At Eweford they found evidence that suggested people started to bring human remains to the site about six thousand years ago. Here they built and rebuilt a large mound and capped it with a stone cairn. Their funereal practices also involved the construction of a timber enclosure and successive mortuary structures; mortuary enclosures are considered to have been used for the exposure of human remains prior to secondary burial. These wooden constructions were eventually destroyed by fireⁱⁱ.

The long barrows are also considered to have had some sort of territorial symbolism; perhaps signifying that the area adjacent to the barrow is owned by the group whose ancestors are entombed insideⁱⁱⁱ. The burial mounds are very prone to erosion by the elements and stone cairns have often vanished due to the stone being robbed out for another purpose. The mounds that were in the fertile land of East Lothian are vulnerable to damage by ploughing; often it is just aerial photography that reveals where they once were.

On the other hand, the act of ploughing has revealed to us hidden graves, especially the stone lined box grave we know as a 'cist' and it is to this form of burial that we now turn.

Cists

The cist burial can be separated into two distinct types: the short cist and the long cist. The one main thing that they have in common is that they are basically a hole lined with stone slabs, into which was put human remains and sometimes artefacts. The trend towards placing remains in cists started in the late third millennium BC. The earliest form was the short cist, which was used for the burial of single, multiple, articulated, cremated and mixed cremated remains^iv. The Bronze Age short cist does not tend to have grave-goods^v but some have been found to contain cinerary urns (for it was at this time that the use of cinerary urns was being adopted in Scotland^vi) into which the cremated remains would be placed and then inhumed in the cist. Usually only the remains of one person would be placed in the urn but sometimes there would be two or more. However, at one site near Dunbar the remains of at least 21 individuals were found in one massive cist that dates to the Iron Age^vii. What is not known is whether these people died at the same time or were they kept aside until a specific person died and their remains would join the first?

The next phase of cist burial was the long cist. This was as the name suggests, a full length stone lined burial. These graves appear more frequently in the archaeological record from the first few centuries AD onwards^viii.

Cist burials are the most numerous of prehistoric burial types that are found in the Luffness and surrounding area and we should now take a look at the cist burials that have been recorded.

Coastal Cists

We can see from the excavations and finds that have been recorded that the coastal plain of East Lothian has numerous prehistoric inhumations of the short cist type. All along the coast from Dunbar to Longniddry, on the elevated spots of Kingston common (NT58SW 152) and around North Berwick Law (NT58SE 13) can be found short cist burials. In fact the site at Kingston has evidence of burials spanning the Neolithic to the early second millennium AD^ix.

If we move down the coast a little from North Berwick onto the West Links,there is an area near the Eel Burn (NT58NW 6) where Bronze Age cists were found. A total of twenty three cists, three of which had urns. Human bones without cists were also found at the burn side.

There is no evidence of burials from the Eel Burn to Marine Villa but a little further along the coast there is another site that was popular for cist burials in the Iron Age (NT48NE 1). The site was visited in 1902 and the investigators^x found bones protruding from the dunes and the remains of small cairns. Some of the cairns had cists underneath them (illustration 2).

Illustration 2: One of the cists was described as being of a different type from the others and had a 'circular flattish mound of sand and stones, about two yards in diameter and one and a half feet high.' This grave contained the well preserved skeletons of three adults.Proc Soc Antiq Scot May 12 1902. Page 654- 658

This site in 1902 was around 200m South of Eyebroughy, in a windswept valley between two sand dunes. In 1962 the cairns had vanished, believed to have been covered in wind blown sand. However, they were rediscovered (NT48NE 1) forty years later when the cairns became visible again. This just goes to show you the changing nature of this wind blown landscape.

Now we continue along the coast to the other side of Gullane where we find Gullane Golf Club. Here in 1968 there was discovered the site of a long cist cemetery (NT48SE 19).It is described thus:

'A group of long cists was discovered on the 26th December 1968 during the removal of sand on Gullane No 3 Golf Course. Four adult graves, each containing a well-preserved skeleton, aligned roughly ENE-WSW, were arranged in a row side by side, about 2ft 9 ins apart, and a fifth cist, 2ft 3 ins long, containing the inhumation of a baby, lay to the N. An exploratory trench to the W of these cists revealed the capstones of a sixth long cist, which was not fully excavated. The total number of cists at this site is unknown, but the fact that at least a second row of graves exists suggests that there is a well organised cemetery. There is no record of a chapel. Following the excavation, the cists were left intact, and covered over with sand and turf.'

It seems that the land under what is now the sacred turf of many a championship links course, once provided the community with a hallowed site to conceal the remains of their dead; or to put it another way – we have gone from burials to bunkers!

The Gullane burials could well have been visible from the vantage point of Gala Law, which is a place that has drawn people to it over the ages. Here was also found evidence of burial activity. Finds here have included several pieces of cinerary urn (NT48SE 24) which were found in 1880 and in April 1984 (NT48SE 53) two incomplete male skeletons were found by some children playing by the erosion face of a sandy bank. However, inspection of the site revealed no traces of a cist or pit, nor were there any artefacts.

Further down the hill we find the site (NT48SE 1.01) of the supposed Viking graves; these we discussed in the previous chapter. These were not the only graves found at Luffness as another skeleton was found in a long cist in a field between the house and the Avenue (NT48SE 4)though no claims are made about its origin. A little further inland at (NT48SE 14) Park Hills near West Fenton a cist was discovered in December 1943 when ploughing a field. This cist was about 1m deep and 50cm wide and contained the inhumation of a child, accompanied by a beaker. The beaker was thought to be from the Early Bronze Age.^xi

The practice of placing of beakers into graves is thought to have arrived from Scandinavia with the so called 'Beaker People' who it is suggested introduced metal working to Britain 4000 years ago. Beakers were fancy pots for drink or food. Another example from a cist containing a child's grave was found at Thornton at Innerwick^xii. It is thought to date from sometime between 2300 and 1800 BC. We can only surmise at the reasons why beakers were placed in graves.

I can't find any evidence for burials in the Nature Reserve area but I suppose that this isn't surprising given the changing nature of this landscape. Once over the Peffer Burn this all changes, as the coast from Aberlady to Longniddry was once a very popular place for burial. It was (NT47NW 1) described in 1792^xiii as having:

'…...a great many stone graves, all of them that have been opened containing human bones; particularly in Gosford Links, they are laid almost as thick as in a churchyard; many of them lie nearly south and north.'

The orientation of these graves indicates that they were Pagan due to the fact that Christian graves are usually orientated east west. The author also described the presence of two large tumuli close to the graves.

This abundance of ancient burials continues into the area that is now home to Longniddry golf course and into the private gardens of the residents of Longniddry (NT47NW 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 39). Excavations at Longniddry have unearthed at least forty different cist burials. The largest of these was in the garden of a house called Four Winds^xiv, where a cemetery was found containing at least twenty seven graves. It is likely that the cemetery was in use from the first half of the fifth to the beginning of the eighth century AD. This time span shows a continuity of use into the Christian period and I wonder if it ceased perhaps when they moved to a burial site close to a chapel?

Continuity and conclusion

One of the most captivating elements of this subject is the continuity that can be found at different sites. A site such as the burial mound at Eweford was intermittently used for thousands of years; remaining significant throughout many different burial practices and belief systems. Archaeologists found evidence that when the mound at Eweford was two thousand years old, people started digging pits around the base of the mound and depositing burnt human remains in them. This practice is thought to have continued for about six hundred years. Then later generations covered these pits with stone cairns and into the cairn material they incorporated bone and other artefacts. A later generation then started removing stones from the cairn so that they could create hollows into which they placed human remains. By the time this was happening the mound was an ancient monument which had been the focus point for ceremony for millennia. It was to this site that the people came in 700 BC to start a new phase; they cut into the mound and placed a cist to hold the remains of a funeral pyre. Evidence for similar activity was found at a site close by called Pencraig Hill. This was the site of an ancient mortuary into which the people inserted a cist precisely in relation to the earlier monument, which had been built and burned a millennia earlier^xv.

However, the enthusiasm for such burials did not continue into subsequent generations. Burials in the Christian period moved into the churchyard in what was becoming the medieval world. Therefore, we must end our tour through the burial sites of time and place, even though we have just scratched the surface of this fascinating subject.

References

iHistoric Scotland Leaflet: Prehistoric Burials, 2011

iiThe Lands of Ancient Lothian, O. Lelong and G. MacGregor 2008. ISBN13: 978 0903903 417: Page xxi

iiiThe countryside Encyclopaedia. R. Muir. 1988. ISBN. 0-333-43621-0:)Page 118

ivThe Lands of Ancient Lothian, O. Lelong and G. MacGregor 2008. ISBN13: 978 0903903 417: Page 230

vThe Lands of Ancient Lothian, O. Lelong and G. MacGregor 2008. ISBN13: 978 0903903 417: Page 110

viHistoric Scotland Leaflet: Prehistoric Burials, 2011

viiBrothwell and Powers, D R and R (1967) 'A massive cist with multiple Burials of Iron Age date, Lochend, Dunbar, Part II:The Iron Age people of Dunbar', Proc Soc Antiq Scot, vol.98

viii Historic Scotland Leaflet: Prehistoric Burials, 2011

ix SAIR34Two prehistoric short-cists and an early medieval long-cist cemetery with dug graves on Kingston Common, North Berwick, East Lothian by Ian Suddaby: http://www.sair.org.uk/sair34/

xJ T Richardson and J S Richardson Proc Soc Antiq Scot May 12 1902. Page 654- 658

xi http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-352-1/dissemination/pdf/vol_078/78_106_119.pdf

xii http://nms.scran.ac.uk/database/record.php?usi=000-100-035-072-C&scache=2f0361o2ki&searchdb=scra

xiii Roy, N (1792) 'Topographical description of the parish of Aberlady', Archaeol Scot, vol.1 Page 517

xiv Long cist burials at Four Winds, Longniddry,East Lothian: Magnar Dalland, Proc SocAntiq Scot, 122 (1992), 197-206

xv The Lands of Ancient Lothian, O. Lelong and G. MacGregor 2008. ISBN13: 978 0903903 417: Pages 115 - 124