As to its position in respect to the heavens’

As to its Position in respect to the Heavens' is a phrase culled from the first page of Herman Moll's A new description of England and Wales which was published in London in the year 1724. It refers to the fixing of positions of places on the surface of the earth by the spherical coordinates of latitude and longitude, these being determined by observations taken of heavenly bodies. The sentence which contains the phrase, goes on to inform the reader how 'many accurate Observations of later years have been made. Mr. Gascoigne, who survey'd Cornwall, and is a Gentleman of distinguished Ability, in the Art of Surveying, has justly fix'd the Lizard Point, or most Southerly Parts of England . . .' Joel Gascoyne published his map of the County of Cornwall in i699; it has been described as a pioneer effort in terms of scale and content.2 Was it equally 'pioneer' as to 'Position in respect to the Heavens'? It seems timely not only to attempt to answer this question but also to review the historical progress made in Britain in this important field of endeavour, and indeed to assess how accurate were the 'many accurate Observations of later years' which so impressed Herman Moll. In order to introduce a comparative as well as a sequential approach, all the geographical co-ordinates from several maps and lists have been subjected to the same processing techniques. From the maps the values have been read off, as accurately as possible, by a variety of romers and measuring devices.3 All the values from the maps and lists were then punched on to cards and fed into the computer program which converted them into Transverse Mercator, National Grid References. The print-out was arranged for ease of plotting in the form Latitude Longitude Place-name Easting Northing. Modern Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain on scales of i: i,250,000 and i: 250,000 have been used as a plotting series, and the old and the new positions have been joined by ordinates where latitudes only were available, or for particular comparisons (see Figs. 5 and 6), by vectors where latitudes were accompanied by longitudes. All longitudes have been evaluated with reference to a meridian through Greenwich. The discovery that the earth was spherical and that location on its surface could be referred to the intersections of a series of small circles parallel to the equator and another series of great circles at right angles to them passing through the poles of the sphere's axis had been made before ancient Greek geography reached its zenith and found immortal expression in monumental work of compilation undertaken by Claudius Ptolemy, fl. A.D. 127-I50. The Greeks and Romans lacked the angleand time-measuring instruments necessary to make good observations for latitude, and longitude fared even worse, not only for the same reason but also for the lack of a natural fixed great circle to designate as zero. Nevertheless, in order to provide a base-line from which to start, a reference point for later comparisons, and an early opportunity to familiarize the reader with a display of the technique when large errors occur, Ptolemy's values have been plotted on Figure i by means of dots: the arrow-heads touch the modern determinations and the lines therefore indicate by means of vectors the errors both in distance and direction. After the death of Ptolemy and the disintegration of the Roman system of administration, geographical horizons, which had been widened both physically and intellectually, closed in again. A thousand years or so were destined to pass before an awakening of interest in such geographical subjects was again clearly discernible in Western Europe. After that of Ptolemy, the earliest yet known map of Britain to be constructed with marginal graduations for latitude and longitude, the Angliae Figurae, was drawn some time between I53 and 1546.4 By this

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• Projections for the large general maps of Britain, 1583–1700

  William Ravenhill•Imago Mundi•1981

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• John Adams, His Map of England, Its Projection, and His Index Villaris of 1680

  William Ravenhill•Geographical Journal•1978

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• Joel Gascoyne, a pioneer of large‐scale county mapping

  William Ravenhill•Imago Mundi•1972

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• A Briefe Summe of Geographie

  Roger Barlow, E G R Taylor•Geographical Journal•1932

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