Major-General William Roy (4 May 17261 July 1790) was a Scottish military engineer, surveyor, and antiquarian. He was an innovator who applied new scientific discoveries and newly emerging technologies to the accurate geodetic mapping of Great Britain. His masterpiece is usually referred to as Roy's Map of Scotland.Roy Military Survey of Scotland, 1747-55 (Highlands), Explore georeferenced maps (National Library of Scotland)Roy Military Survey of Scotland, 1747-55 (Lowlands), Explore georeferenced maps (National Library of Scotland)
It was Roy's advocacy and leadership that led to the creation of the Ordnance Survey in 1791, the year after his death. His technical work in the establishment of a surveying baseline won him the Copley Medal in 1785. His maps and drawings of Roman archaeological sites in Scotland were the first accurate and systematic study of the subject, and have not been improved upon even today. Roy was a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Life and works Early life and family Roy was born at Miltonhead in Carluke parish in South Lanarkshire on 4 May 1726. His father was a factorA factor in Scotland is a representative of a landowner with the responsibilities of an estate manager. in the service of the Gordons/Hamiltons of Hallcraig, as well as an elder of the Kirk. His grandfather had held a similar position as factor, and his uncle acted in that capacity for the Lockharts of Lee. Thus Roy grew up in an environment where making land surveys and using maps was very familiar. He was educated in Carluke parish school and then Lanark Grammar School. The Parish of Carluke, 1288 –1874 There is no record of a further education such as that enjoyed by his younger brother James.James Roy had held the bursary in the Grammar School and College of Glasgow, took a Master of Arts after studies in the Languages and Philosophy, was licensed by the Presbytery of Glasgow, and held several other notable positions before his untimely death in 1767, at the age of 37. Welfare 2024, 8, 97-8, 112-13.
The next few years of his life are poorly documented and have been the subject of much speculation. Roy was certainly associated with the Board of Ordnance by about 1747 (aged 21) when he drew a map of Culloden made some time after the battle. A History of the Ordnance Survey. The material on Roy is in pages 3–9 for the Military Survey, pages13–18 for the Hounslow base, pages 33–37 for the calculation of the Anglo-French Survey and pages 363–365 for his Instructions to Surveyors. Welfare 2024, 33-4
He had come to the notice of Lieutenant-Colonel David Watson, Deputy Quartermaster-General of the Military District of North Britain for the board, whose headquarters were in Edinburgh. At an unknown date Roy had had some opportunity to gain experience by undertaking private surveys for he was a respected land surveyor employed by the Callander family at their Craigforth estate near Stirling sometime before he joined the army in 1755. Memoirs of James Campbell of Ardkinglass, Welfare 2024, 9-10, 72-4
Roy maintained his connections to his birthplace and the people living there. A servant for the Lockharts of Lee recalled his visits there over time, as his national reputation grew. She noted that at first he would dine in the servants hall, in later years he would dine with the family, and later still he would be seated at the right hand of the Laird.
Monument
There is a monument to William Roy at the location of his birthplace on Milton Road near Carluke. It is signposted from the junction of Lanark Road and Cartland Avenue. The monument is in the form of a Hotine pillar, a type of trig point. The inscription reads "Here stood Miltonhead the birthplace of Major-General William Roy 4th May 1726 - 30th June 1790 from whose military map of Scotland made in 1747 - 1755 grew the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain".
Principal sources Baigent (2004a) Dictionary of National Biography (online). Welfare (2024) General William Roy: Father of the Ordnance Survey. The first full biography (pbk edn). Roy (2007) The Great Map: The Military Survey of Scotland. The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey. First published in 1924. Includes some of Roy's letters. Map of a Nation: a Biography of the Ordnance Survey. Ordnance Survey, map makers to Britain since 1791. Available online. A History of the Ordnance Survey. The official account. References to original papers. Available online. History of the Corps of Royal Engineers. Available online.
Roy as surveyor and soldier
The survey of Scotland
In 1747 Lieutenant-Colonel David Watson, Deputy Quartermaster-General, proposed the compilation of a map of the Scottish Highlands following the Jacobite rising of 1745. History of the Royal Engineers, Vol. I, Chapter 8, pp. 167–199 covers the period 1743–1763. In response, King George II commissioned a military survey of the Highlands, and Watson was placed in charge, under the command of the Duke of Cumberland, but it fell to Roy "to begin, and afterwards to have a considerable share in, the execution of that map"Quotation from , The account of the Hounslow baseline.
Roy was without any military rank at this timeSome sources wrongly attribute military rank or regiment to Roy in 1746: the obituary of , page 212, states that Roy held the rank of colonel of artillery. It was David Dundas, and not Roy, who was the nephew of David Watson, as claimed by in Volume 2 (page 229) of his history; Porter also quotes General Wolfe for the same error (page 388). has him a Deputy Quartermaster General in 1746, a rank that he only achieved in 1761. but Watson appointed him as an Assistant Quartermaster to provide him some seniority over the group of (typically) six soldiers who travelled with him: an NCO, two end markers, two chainmen and a batman. From 1749 he was joined by six more junior surveyors for various periods of time, including a seventeen-year-old David Dundas (born 1735), later Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Paul Sandby (born 1731), later renowned for his watercolour landscapes, was responsible for preparing the fair copy of the map.
Eventually there were six teams conducting surveys by traverses of the country: objects on either side of the line were recorded by sketches and compass directions. The Highlands were covered by 1752, but the survey was extended to the lowlands for another three years, until 1755, when most of the engineer surveyors were posted to war stations. In the introduction to the 1785 account of the measurement of the Hounslow baseline Roy writes that the map remained "in an unfinished state ... and is to be considered as a magnificent military sketch rather than a very accurate map of a country ... (and) it would have been completed, and many of its imperfections no doubt remedied, but for the breaking out of war in 1755." The eighty-four original field sheets and the thirty-eight divisions of the "fair-protraction" are held in the British Museum together with a small index map and a reduced map of the whole country in a single sheet published as "the King's map". It is now possible to view the map online.Roy's map is held in the British Museum but it is available online by courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. The index page links to several views of the map including one in which it can be superimposed on the modern map. Roy 2007. Welfare 2024, 26-59
Military appointments Throughout the Survey of Scotland, Roy was a civilian assistant to David Watson the Deputy Quartermaster-General, but in 1755 the survey was terminated by the outbreak of the Seven Years' War with France and the consequent redeployment of personnel to more pressing posts in both the regular army and the Board of Ordnance. In the1757 the Engineers were formed into the Corps of Engineers. The officers of the Board of Ordnance were members of both structures, for they would be deployed with the army regiments for specialist duties.
In 1755-6 Roy was commissioned as a lieutenant in the 53rd Foot, a new regiment, and as a Practitioner Engineer, the lowest rank in the Board of Ordnance survey department. History of the Royal Engineers, vol. II, Part 2, Chapter 1, pp. 88–100 covers the structure of the Board of Ordnance., Chapter 3, gives full details of the structure of the Board of Ordnance at the time of Roy. This thesis also contains many excellent images of maps and plans from the survey in the period. Thereafter Roy was promoted steadily, and rapidly, in both structures, but his army rank was always greater than his board rank. For example, he was lieutenant-colonel in the army by 1762 and director and lieutenant-colonel of the Engineers in 1783. He is best known by his army rank of major-general, which he attained in 1781.
From 1786 to his death in 1790, Roy held the position of Colonel of the 30th (Cambridgeshire) Regiment of Foot.
Active service On the termination of the Scottish survey, Roy, now under the jurisdiction of two military bodies, was posted in 1756 to the South of England where he was engaged, together with Watson and Dundas, in inspecting the readiness of coastal military installations in preparation for an expected French invasion. This work involved Roy in the production of plans of fortifications and maps of roads of strategic importance and of stretches of the south coast: examples are a sketch of the country from Gloucester to Pembroke, with Milford Haven, and a sketch of the country between Guildford and Canterbury. These sketches are preserved in the British Library.
By 1757 Roy was with his regiment in France for the Rochefort expedition and then for the raid on St Malo. In 1759-63 he was with the army in Germany. At the Battle of Minden in 1759 his technical abilities and willingness to innovate brought him to the favourable attention of his commanders. Lieutenant Roy presented his survey of the battle on a sheet with coordinated and accurate overlying flaps that showed the different stages in the engagement. Thereafter his promotion was rapid, and by the end of the war in 1763 Roy was a Lieutenant Colonel in the regiment and the Deputy Quartermaster General responsible for the evacuation of the army from Germany.
Surveyor and man of science
At the conclusion of the war in 1763 Roy returned to London, where he was based for the rest of his life. The threatened French invasion of the south coast had never materialised, but he felt strongly that the reconnaissances he had made with Watson at the outbreak of the war should be extended to a national survey, not just of the vulnerable south but the whole of the British Isles. He never ceased to champion this cause, but the expense of the Seven Years' War and then the American War of Independence excluded any expenditure on trigonometrical surveys for another twenty years.
During the Military Survey of Scotland he had recorded the whole coastline, a topic which became an acknowledged speciality. In 1765 he was appointed under a Royal Warrant "to inspect, survey and make reports from time to time of the state of the coasts of this Kingdom and the islands thereunto belonging." This work - crucial to the defence of the realm - took him to many parts of Britain and Ireland and is recorded in the many plans and sketch maps of districts that are now lodged at the British Library.
Despite the necessary time away from the capital, Roy was able to enter fully into the intellectual life of London, and in 1767 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society; the Society's dining clubs were his social centre. The first paper that he published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions, in 1777, was on the search for a rule to determine topographical heights using barometric pressure, a subject on which he had conducted exhaustive and meticulous research and fieldwork. Roy was promoted to Colonel in 1777, as Commissary General in 1778 and to rose to Major General in 1781.