Peter Ross at large: Top of the charts

Published on Saturday 21 November 2009 19:08

TALK about irony. On Salisbury Place in Edinburgh is a modern building so ugly that it ought to be wiped off the map, yet this is home to one of the largest collections of maps in the world, some very beautiful and old. The Map Library reading room of the National Library of Scotland holds around two million cartographic items covering every part of the world and some parts out of it – star charts and maps of the moon. You could lose yourself in here.

One of the highlights of the collection – Paolo Forlani's 16th-century map of Scotland, the first time the country appeared on a map in its own right – is on display in the main library building on George IV Bridge as part of an exhibition to mark the end of the year of homecoming. But the map library has treasures to spare. These are caged in a strong room, accessed by security code, watched over by cameras, the atmosphere kept cool and dry. Large rolled maps lie in tough protective tubes like torpedoes or tombs

"I could get you out the smelliest map in the library," offers Bill Todd, one of the librarians, with a jovial air. He wanders off, returning with a box containing a huge 1783 map split into sections. "You have a sniff at that."

It's hard to describe how the map smells without inventing words. berfoosty would be one. Or megamingin. And I'm sorry to say that the area rendered so unpleasantly is my home county, Clackmannanshire.

This strong room is a place of extremes, and not just when it comes to aroma. Here you'll find the oldest map in the library – a 14th-century representation of the whole known world, drawn on vellum by the monk Ranulph Higden, which looks more like an image from a brain scan than our planet. Here, too, is the most valuable item in the collection – Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas, made in the 16th century by the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius. It's valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds. "But," says Chris Fleet, manager of the collection, "economic worth is a side issue compared with what these maps are worth to Scottish culture."

Fleet, 41, is at once boyish and donnish with his neat beard, green cords and Paisley-pattern tie

– and a burning enthusiasm for his subject, though. "There's a simplistic view that once there were bad maps and now there are good maps, and in the future things will get better still," he says. "That overlooks many of the more interesting aspects of the maps. In the past, often the strict geographical accuracy that we tend to care about the most wasn't so important to their creators. All the other meanings of maps become more visible when we leave accuracy to one side. Maps give us key insights not just into the creator's mind but also into the culture that created them."

In other words, maps have second lives. Over time they become obsolete as tools for getting around, but they can be read in new ways and sometimes take on unexpected emotional resonances, becoming mildewed with sadness, stained with horror.

Spread out on a large table in the reading room is a book of 16 hand-drawn maps showing the 1774 survey of Assynt by the talented Edinburgh-based surveyor, John Home. "This is an example of how a lot of beautiful maps have a dark underbelly," says Fleet. "The story of mapping this area is bound up with tragedy and destruction."

This survey was the first manifestation of a desire by the Sutherland estate owners to generate more revenue from their land, an impulse that would eventually spark the inferno of the Clearances. Within three or four decades of these beautiful pages being drawn, crofters in Assynt would be burned out of their homes, forced from fields that were wanted for the profitable grazing of livestock. One of the maps shows, in its bottom left-hand corner, an elegant drawing of boats in The Minch while a sheep stands impassive on the shore. Supposed to be a bucolic scene, it feels more like a vision of a violent future.

Everything Fleet shows me is a wonder of sorts. A large English government map from the 1730s pinpointing, in dangerous red, the locations of those clans loyal to the Jacobite cause. An Ordnance Survey map of Edinburgh in 1877 so detailed that it includes individual trees and the poles of drying greens. There's even a 1984 map of the Firth of Clyde which would be unremarkable except that it was produced in the Soviet Union and shows clearly the Gare Loch and Faslane Naval Base. All the place names are written in the Cyrillic alphabet; Helensburgh looks very odd like that.

The Soviets had detailed maps of Scotland, showing industrial and military buildings, hospitals and bridges. These were based on OS maps but enhanced by information from satellites and people – spies – on the ground. These maps still give off something of a Cold War chill and, looking at them, it's hard not to shiver a little.

It's easy, however, to understand how people become obsessive cartophiles. This article is being written in a small room with a large map of Scotland on the wall, and though it's neither old nor fancy, I often find it hard to tear my eyes away. On my map, Glasgow and Edinburgh resemble well-fed spiders, motorways and A-roads spindling out from their swollen bodies like long red legs. The islands off the west coast also make enticing shapes – the hunched dragon of Islay, the poor shattered Uists, the antler of Skye. Up in the north-east it's the weird names that draw me: Wells of Ythan, Folla Rule, Meikle Wartle.

Paul Clark knows all about the seductive qualities of maps. The 53-year-old proprietor of Carson Clark, a shop selling antique maps on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, he grew up in a home with maps on the walls of every room; his father was a founder of the British Cartographic Society. He is so well informed that he can identify particular 18th-century mapmakers by the style of their lettering, and is even able to offer an explanation for the whiffy Clackmannanshire map – the glue used to stick the paper to its linen backing was made, he thinks, from scrapings of rabbit skin.

Mostly, Clark appreciates maps as objects of beauty. "These are decorative works of art," he insists. He certainly has some fantastic things. Best of all, perhaps, and certainly the most expensive at 6,200, is a 1574 map of Iceland by Abraham Ortelius. "It's one of the first maps to show the monsters of the ocean," says Clark. "The monsters are numbered and there's an explanation telling you which were kind to sailors and which would eat them. And look, he's got polar bears dancing up there in the ice field."

There's a world of difference between Ortelius' psychedelic, beast-brimming map and the map that people in the UK consult most often – the road atlas. Of course, it wouldn't do to have representations of sea serpents in the Solway Firth, just off the B794, but there is something subtly harmful about our reliance on these bland maps.

The first British road atlases were made by Scots. John Ogilby, from near Dundee, published his map of the roads of England and Wales in 1675, a year before his death. A century later, Aberdeen's George Taylor and Andrew Skinner created a Scottish equivalent. Their maps give a vivid sense of the landscape through which the user could expect to travel. Even the inns are marked, presumably because the weary cartographers slaked their drouth in them.

Our contemporary road atlases, by contrast, are so abstract as to give only the merest suggestion of the terrain between those interconnecting ribbons of colour, and that surely must affect how we visualise our country. It's easy to fall into thinking of Scotland as a chain of code – M8 meets A80 meets M80 meets M9 meets A9 – and to become disconnected from the glens, fens, and but'n'bens that comprise the actual physical landscape. Maps, therefore, can have a psychological impact. The human mind shapes them and then they shape the human mind.

It's mid-afternoon when I leave the library, the sky already beginning to dim and smudge. Walking through Edinburgh, after hours in the company of Chris Fleet, there's a distinct feeling of being inside a city map, observed from above.

The collection manager is very keen to promote the website, www.nls.uk, where over 20,000 maps of Scotland can be seen, but there's a lot to be said for visiting the library in person. It's very quiet, which is part of its charm, but deserves to be much busier than it is. How sad to think that a place where remembrance is held sacred, a place where crofts which long ago burned to ash and blew away still exist as ink on paper, should itself be forgotten, a skipped-past page. That's a tragedy on a small scale, but a tragedy nonetheless.