In October 1795, Sir John Sinclair asked Rev. Robert Douglas of Galashiels to “assist the Board of Agriculture” by updating and republishing the County Surveys of Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire. Sinclair had been frustrated at the eccentric diversity of styles employed by the various contributors to the first phase of the Statistical Account, and he now sought to standardise according to the model of his favourite: the Midlothian survey. He hoped that Douglas would contribute his local knowledge to a national statistical survey, by copying the format, structure, and style of a prototype. However, the production of this survey, and in particular the production of the map it contained, illustrates just how challenging such standardisation could be.

Map of Roxburghshire, from the General View of the Agriculture in the Counties of Roxburgh and Selkirk (1798). Photo by the author.

By January 1798, Douglas’s reports were completed and published, alongside a map of each county, in a single volume: General View of the Agriculture in the Counties of Roxburgh and Selkirk, with Observations on the Means of Their Improvement. To produce the maps, Douglas engaged the professional assistance of the Edinburgh-based mapmaker John Ainslie. Ainslie has been called “virtually the Master-General of Scotland’s national survey”. He was employed to prepare maps of a number of Scotland’s southern counties, at the indirect behest of Sinclair, to illustrate the various Surveys in the late 1790s. In some cases, where the county had already been surveyed in recent decades, Ainslie’s task was merely to copy pre-existing maps. In the case of Roxburghshire, Ainslie used a pantographer to reduce Matthew Stobie’s 1770 map of the county. Ainslie wrote to Douglas in May 1797:

I have perused the coloured map of the County [of Roxburghshire] and has [sic] begun Engraving a new Plate by reducing Stobies map exactly and have put in the villages and Towns from the map you sent onto me. I am at the greatest loss about the Hills. You complain of them being too dark, if I had done them for another county they would have been reckoned too light. I am doing the County of Kirkudbright just now and the people concern’d about it finds great fault because the hills are not dark enough altho much bolder than your map they have actually given me orders to make every one of them stronger before I get them done as they want they will be very dark indeed.

So Ainslie had trouble standardising the topographical features on his county maps, as he found that different counties’ hills required different treatment. In the same letter he refers to the map of Selkirkshire as “totally hills which is the most tedious of all engraving”.

In the preface of his General View, Douglas felt obliged to explain the different cartographic rationales that informed the maps of Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire:

In that [map] of Roxburghshire, nothing is inserted, but the names of parishes, towns, villages, such places as are mentioned in the work, and a few on the confines which jut out into other counties. With regard to Selkirkshire, there being few parish churches or villages, and not many farms deserving particular notice in an agricultural view, had the same rule been rigidly followed, a large track of it would have appeared uninhabited; to prevent which, the seats of the residing proprietors, the places from whence others take their titles, and some of the most extensive farms, are named in the map

In some cases, the imperfect science of hill-mapping led to debates about a hill’s very existence. Douglas had sought advice about possible “alterations and additions” to Ainslie’s draft map of Roxburghshire. He sent a manuscript copy to a number of correspondents, who took it out into the field to test its accuracy. James Arkle, minister for Castletown in the southern tip of Roxburghshire, wrote to Douglas with his own opinions on Ainslie’s map:

I received yours with the Map of the County inclosed which I now return and shall with pleasure give such answers to your enquiries as my information enables me… I have… carried the map along with me thro’ the parish and have compared it with the real situation of the Country by occular [sic] inspection. The line is drawn with ink separating the moor from the green pasture as accurately as possible. We are not of M^r Olivers opinion as to the nonexistence of the hill he has crossed. It lies between Thorlishope and Peel, tho’ not high when compared with the others near it, yet it rises to a considerable height. I cannot say that I am able to mark the hills by name as they appear on your map. If you have a copy of Stobies Map of County, I believe they are distinctly pointed out on it.

“M^r Oliver” had been given first look at Ainslie’s map, which was a reduced version of Stobie’s, and had crossed out a hill. Clearly Arkle disagreed with his assessment, on the basis of his own subjective “occular inspection.” The hill in question lay northeast of Thorlishope, and is represented by a faint fingerprint-like symbol on Stobie’s map.

Detail from Matthew Stobie’s Map of Roxburghshire or Tiviotdale (1770). The hill in question is the section of shading north of Thorlishope. Image: NLS.

It is absent from the map ultimately published with Douglas’s General View, whereas the nearby hills northwest of Dawstane are clearly defined on it. It was not until later in the nineteenth century that the Ordnance Survey used contours to standardise hill-sketching.

In the meantime, the status and depiction of hills varied from map to map, depending on the criteria and propensities of the mapmaker(s), or on the subjective “occular inspection” of a chain of informants. This meant that, on the maps of the Statistical Account, a hill of a certain height in one county was not necessarily a hill in another. Therefore, Sinclair’s desire for standardised surveys according to one archetypical model was necessarily thwarted.

 Philip Dodds, School of Geosciences University of Edinburgh
Twitter: @PA_Dodds

We hope you have enjoyed this post: it is characteristic of the rich historical material available within the ‘Related Resources’ section of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland service. Featuring essays, maps, illustrations, correspondence, biographies of compliers, and information about Sir John Sinclair’s other works, the service provides extensive historical and bibliographical detail to supplement our full-text searchable collection of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Statistical Accounts.

Sources

Robert Douglas’s correspondence, quoted here, is in the National Library of Scotland: MS.3117.

Yesterday saw the LOCH and End-to-End projects host a joint event at Glasgow’s Hilton Grosvenor Hotel to look at technical issues related to Open Access policcy compliance for the REF.  The morning session consisted of a series of short ‘show-and-tell’ sessions whereby participants generously gave up their time to demonstrate how the repository and research information systems they use can support the new requirements, which came into play on Friday.

After lunch, delegates joined groups looking at technical issues in PURE and DSpace.  Another group discussed some of the non-technical issues to do with REF policy and OA funding and spent time sharing experiences and best practice.  The day was rounded off with presentations about CASRAI, SHERPA-REF and Jisc Publications Router.

The organisers are in the process of writing up a more thorough report, to be published on the LOCH and End-to-End blogs in the next few days.

Dominic Tate, LOCH Project Manager

This week saw the publication of a new Facet Publishing title: Dynamic Research Support for Academic Libraries – a book which is aimed at enabling academic librarians to develop excellent services to support research.  

As Manager of the LOCH Project, I contributed a chapter in the form of a case study, entitled Implementing Open Access across a Large University: A Case Study from the University of Edinburgh. A pre-print of this case study is now available from Edinburgh Research Archive at http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15766.  Hopefully this may be of interest to practitioners looking at implementing more formal processes for ensuring Open Access to journal articles and conference proceedings – especially in light of the HEFCE Open Access Policy for REF, which comes into effect today (eek)!

In case this chapter whets your appetite for finding out more about some of the latest thinking in library research support, then you may be interested in the video below, in which the book’s editor Starr Hoffman explains the topics covered.  You can also peek inside the book if you wish.

***with apologies for any shameless self-promotion***

Dominic Tate, Project Manager – LOCH

Following on from Archibald Campbell’s account of the Zeppelin raid on Edinburgh and Leith one hundred years ago this weekend, minutes and images from Lothian Health Services Archive (LHSA) reveal its impact on the city’s hospital services.

As Archibald noted, the raid inflicted great damage on his school, George Watson’s College, just minutes away from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on its Lauriston Place site. The impact upon Scotland’s largest voluntary hospital was less than that suffered by the school, but still notable. Luckily, LHSA holds a comprehensive account of the effects of the bomb damage on the Infirmary in minutes of the hospital’s House Committee. The Committee met a week after the blast, on 10th April 1916 (LHB1/1/54). According to the account, the George Watson’s bomb caused windows in three wards to be broken, along with damage to side rooms and an operating theatre – miraculously, however, no staff or patients were killed.

Bomb damage to buildings near the Infirmary, 2 – 3 April 1916 (P/PL1/E/208).

In addition, an incendiary bomb was dropped on the Infirmary itself, on the boiler house, although this caused relatively little damage.

Incendiary bomb in situ at the Royal Infirmary , 1916 (P/PL1/E/021).

Like Archibald Campbell, Infirmary staff kept their own souvenir. Here at LHSA, we have this memento: a part of the actual incendiary bomb in a glass display case, which we store in our off-site store (because it is bulky rather than because it could go off!)

Incendiary bomb in glass display case  (LHSA object collection, O26).

The Infirmary kept services going despite the raid, with the House Committee minutes praising medical, surgical and nursing staff, who carried out their duties ‘notwithstanding the immanence of personal danger … their individual efforts to reassure the patients did much to allay the alarm which naturally existed in the Hospital.’

The minutes record that 27 people were treated for bomb damage during the night, 12 of whom ‘were treated as in-patients, two of whom subsequently died and the remainder  were treated in the out-patient department.’ The Infirmary’s General Register, which records admissions to the hospital, reflects the casualties from the night. Although the injuries to some are not explicitly stated as caused by the bomb, it is possible to have a good guess at the identity of these twelve patients and to trace the individuals who were to die from their wounds. The House Committee states that two of these patients did not survive their injuries. The General Register suggests that these unfortunates were a 45 year old carter from Grassmarket who died from perforation of the liver with a shell and an arterio-sclerotic 74 year old mason who succumbed to shock after an operation for an injury to the knee caused by the bombing.

Section from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh General Register of Patients (LHB1/126/61) showing how bomb injuries were described.

One thing that those injured by the bomb had in common was their locality. Patients were centred around the old town, from the Grassmarket to St Leonards and the area of the present University of Edinburgh, making injuries such as ‘scratches to face and ear’ to people from these areas more likely than not to have been caused by effects of the raid. Others suffered injuries to the arms, legs, abdomen and head, or had eye injuries through flying glass. We can also match their addresses to bomb sites named on contemporary police and fire brigade reports.

For example, two of these patients were from 16 Marshall Street: a male tailor, who underwent surgery for a serious perforation wound to the eye; and a dressmaker, whose face had to be stitched. Both were discharged (the dressmaker on the same day and the tailor after almost four weeks). Nonetheless, they were the lucky ones in this four-storey building, housing shops, domestic dwellings, a dispensary and a school. A police report cites that six people were killed in total from the address. Three people standing in the building’s doorway and a man standing across the street were amongst the fatalities, according to the fire brigade account of the night.

However, although no staff were injured in the explosion, the House Committee minutes point to its possible psychological effects. The Lady Superintendent of Nurses, Miss Annie Warren Gill, was worried that, if another raid should occur, members of her staff could be ‘rendered unsuitable for duty through nervousness – some of them having suffered considerably that way on the recent occasion.’

Annie Warren Gill, Lady Superintendent of Nurses, 1907 – 1925 (LHSA photography collection).

Committee members also showed concern at the lack of warning given for the attack to Infirmary officials, beyond the regular lowering of lights. In preparation for an increase in casualties following another attack, proposals were made for emergency staffing from existing medical and surgical teams.

The main part of the meeting was signed off with approbation for the enemy’s conduct, ‘the recklessness of which while dooming it to military failure endangered the lives of the inmates of an Institution whose doors have at all times been open to the suffering sick of all nations.’

Louise Williams, Archivist, LHSA

An earlier story about the attack can be read here: I: A School student walks among the wreckage