To the South England, to the West Eternity: Mapping Boundlessness in Modern Scottish Fiction

Abstract

The 2011 book Scotland: Mapping the Nation brings together hundreds of images from archives to construct a narrative of the mapping of Scotland from its very first appearance as part of maps of Britain and of Europe, to the mid-seventeenth century, when Scotland was “arguably, one of the best-mapped countries in the world.” Fleet, Wilkes, and Withers’s aim is “to examine how and why Scotland became, and has continued to be, a mappable object.”² The authors also highlight Scotland’s role in mapmaking (in the twentieth century, Scotland was more prominent than England in map production), and argue that as Scottish mapmakers turned to map Scotland in the late sixteenth century, they did so to “know” and “show” their country as a nation proper through cartography. The maps they created would also become a visual source of identity within Scotland. The picture of Scotland would soon be a popular image, included as logo on export products like whisky: “Scotland’s unity,” the authors argue, “the geographical image that is held of the historical nation, is not something simply revealed by maps. It is, rather the result of maps and of the mapping process which […] has powerfully determined the public’s map consciousness of Scotland as a nation and as a national space.”³

The one plodded steadily on through the grass, the other made a planet with her dozen stones …

Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood, 1928.¹