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the key aspirations of Enlightenment thinkers was the creation of a vibrant ‘public sphere’ in which every member of the populace would feel free to ‘ Sapere aude! ’ – to dare to think for themselves.
    The Enlightenment had important consequences for maps and map-making in Britain. A new ideal was dangled before surveyors: that cartography could be a language of reason, capable of creating an accurate image of the natural world. Enlightenment thinkers invested maps with the hope that the repeated observation and measurement of the landscape would build up an archive of knowledge that approached to perfect truth. The French philosophes Diderot and d’Alembert saw maps as images of the ordered, rational mind, and they compared their own Encyclopédie to ‘a kind of world map’ whose articles functioned like ‘individual, highly detailed maps’. The natural philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle described the zeitgeist of the Age of Enlightenment as an ‘ esprit géométrique ’. The twentieth-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has encapsulated thedesire of thinkers in this period for ultimate ‘Exactitude in Science’ by likening it to the ultimately doomed objective to make ‘a Map of the Empire’ on the scale of one-to-one, whose ‘size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.’
    Accuracy, or rather ‘the quantifying spirit’, thus became a new priority for map-makers in the eighteenth century, inspiring such dramatic advances in instruments and methods that, by the second half of the century, Britain was home to some of the most precise map-making and astronomical instruments in the world and the most diligent, rational surveyors. The emergence of relatively trustworthy maps had profound effects on the way they were used by the general populace. As we shall see later, the new maps assisted the process by which Britain’s component regions were integrated into a unified nation. Progress in cartography occurred in parallel with the improvement of the nation’s road networks, the innovations in coach design that made travel cheaper and less uncomfortable, and historical and cultural events that heralded a new dawn in the British tourist industry. Maps became hallmarks of an ‘enlightened’ mind and nation. And in 1720 a surveyor called George Mark issued a call to arms to the principal players of the Scottish Enlightenment, begging them to further the state of cartography: ‘’Tis truely strange why our Scotish [ sic ] Nobility and Gentry, who are so universally esteemed for their Learning, Curiosity and Affection for their Country, should suffer an Omission of this Nature … in what so much concerns the Honours of the Nation!’
     
    D AVID W ATSON GREW up in the early decades of the Scottish Enlightenment among a family who were enthusiastic sponsors of its values. In spite of a certain degree of anti-intellectual bluster on Robert Dundas’s part, and his reputation for never having been ‘known to read a book’, Arniston’s library was impressively stocked with travel-narratives, topographical writings, atlases, maps and expensive globes. A theoretical knowledge of surveying was considered integral to the education of anenlightened gentleman, who was expected to be able to commission and judge maps of his own estate. Arniston House accordingly boasted an inspiring collection of surveying instruments and a series of cartographic depictions of the large and varied surrounding estate. We can imagine that David Watson, and Elizabeth and Robert Dundas’s own children, looked on in fascination as well-known estate surveyors, and famous architects such as William Adam, laid measuring chains along the lengths of the youngsters’ favourite avenues of trees, translating the familiar Midlothian landscape into numbers, angles and lines on a map.
    The Dundases’ enthusiasm for geography was such that they even attended the prestigious lectures on surveying that were