Ben Lawers Historic Landscape Project

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John Farquharson's 1769 Survey of North Lochtayside

For anyone interested in rural Scotland in the 18th century, John Farquharson's 1769 Survey of the North Side of Loch Tay is one of the brightest jewels in the National Archives of Scotland. Farquharson, with the help of two assistants, spent 18 weeks mapping the landscape of the lochside, and produced a volume of twenty-four plans showing farm boundaries, arable fields, woodland, pasture and meadows, as well as farmsteads, mills, smithies, schoolhouses, roads and bridges.

The maps have been an important source for researchers for many years, but although the amount of detail has often been praised, the accuracy of Farquharson's work has never been assessed. This year the Royal Commission have taken scanned copies of the maps, and rectified them using Aerial 5, software developed to fit aerial photographs to Ordnance Survey maps. This has enabled us to 'stretch' the 1769 survey across the modern map, and then compare it with the RCAHMS survey of the archaeology of Ben Lawers (2000-1).

The results have been exciting, and demonstrate that Farquharson was an accomplished surveyor. Time and again we have been able to match the settlements mapped in 1769 with groups of ruined buildings. Moreover, where Farquharson shows structures that were not recorded during the initial survey, a revisit, armed with the rectified maps, has often revealed slight remains that had previously been overlooked. Conversely, where we have recorded structures that do not appear on Farquharson's maps, we can now be confident that they were not there in the mid-18th century.

Extract from the rectified map of Kiltyrie (National Archives of Scotland RHP 973/1 plan 6), with RCAHMS survey

One small extract from Kiltyrie is illustrated here, with the RCAHMS survey shown in red (buildings) and orange (dykes and enclosures). The 1769 map shows a slight drift to the north, but this is only to be expected, and by moving Farquharson's map about a building's length to the south most of the farmsteads fall neatly into position. The exception is the farmstead of Wester Kiltyrie (centre left). Here we recorded a ruined steading of three buildings around a yard, but the 1769 map shows a similar plan about 40m to the west. At first we thought that these were the same site, and that Farquharson had made an error, but a search of the boggy ground revealed one of the buildings from 1769, reduced to a slight mound of turf. It seems that the tenant rebuilt his steading, sometime after 1769, on drier ground to the east.

The rectified maps have now been made available to all partners in the Ben Lawers project. One regret to come out of this exercise, however, is that we still know very little about John Farquharson himself, and this tremendous piece of work appears to be his only legacy.

Steve Boyle RCAHMS [External Link]

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