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William Roy was commissioned in 1747 to undertake a military survey of the Scottish mainland, beginning in the Highlands. Roy used the military roads constructed by Generals Wade and Caulfield after the 1715 rising, as a way of organising his work. Unlike previous maps, which were often little more than an amalgam of previous charts, Roy’s survey used actual measurement and traverse survey along the length of the new road network.

After summers in the field and winters collating the results of their work in Edinburgh Castle, in 1755, Roy’s team produced two versions, a sketch and a fair copy. The latter comprised 84 brown linen map rolls giving 38 folding sheets. The complete map measured 20 by 30 feet. This was an impressive achievement accomplished in so short a time. However, as the work was not related to longitude or latitude and the maps were not aligned to true north, mistakes, after many traverses and successive offset measurements, accumulated steadily. The east end of Loch Leven in Fife is shown 20 miles south of its true position. The maps also lack features which had no strategic military value. Informed guesses were made about the nature of the landscapes remote from the military roads. Most of the islands were also omitted. Roy himself thought the survey was more of a ‘magnificent military sketch than a very accurate map of the country’. Place-names were not recorded systematically, and where they were, this was not done with any apparent knowledge of Gaelic. Some phonetic renderings are shown, which do have a certain value, as they reflect local pronunciations of the time.