THE FRENCH SCHOOL OF DUBLIN LAND
SURVEYORS
J. H. ANDREWS
Trinity College Dublin
Q. In what school of engineering were you originally brought up ?
A. In the French school of Rocque.
(Select committee on the survey and valuation of Ireland, 1824. Evidence of
David Aher)
Although the historical study of Irish land surveying has not yet
progressed very far it is already beginning to seem likely that in any
large collection of estate maps a fair proportion of the older specimens
will fall within a rather narrow range of style and subject matter. On
maps earlier than 1750*, in particular, the dominant features, often the
only features to be picked out in colour, are usually the outer boundaries
of one or more townlands or other named tenurial units. Outside these
boundaries, the names of adjoining tenements are written in position,
and the points on the boundary where three denominations meet are
marked by a cruciform junction-symbol which in its many varieties was
probably the most widely used convention among Irish estate cartographers. Inside the boundary, the typical early eighteenth-century map
is disappointingly uninformative. The only item that can almost always
be relied upon is the acreage of the tenement, most often in Irish or
' plantation ' units based on the twenty-one foot perch but sometimes,
as in parts of south county Cork, in English or statute measure. For the
rest, bold relief features may be represented by primitive mountain drawing (minor landforms being generally disregarded) with lakes and rivers
coloured or penned in with stipple or waterlines. Wood and bog may
be given distinctive ornament, but it is rare to see the state of cultivation
shown by the kind of ' characteristics ' that had long been familiar in
military map-making ; instead, the distinction between arable, pasture
and meadow is either omitted altogether or given in writing, with the
divisions between the different land categories marked by dotted lines.
Fences other than tenement boundaries are also unusual except where
* The following comments are based mainly on the collection of estate maps in the
National Library, Dublin, and like that collection they relate more particularly to
the three southern provinces of Ireland. Other information, where it is not documented in the numbered notes, comes chiefly from contemporary Dublin newspapers.
Dates in brackets refer to issues of the most valuable of these, George Faulkner's
Dublin Journal.
275
they formed improvements in a landowner's demesne. The customary
double line, solid or broken, is used for roads, while buildings appear in
profile or perspective view with architectural details in varying degrees
of conventionalisation. On the whole, coverage of physical and cultural
landscape features is highly selective, as can sometimes be seen from the
written remarks supplied by the cartographers themselves. Thus in one
estate atlas of 1744 a Kildare townland of 139 acres is described as
' divided into twenty-four middling fields by good ditches planted with
white thorn and furze ', but none of the ditches is marked on the corresponding map.1 These topographical deficiencies cannot be excused by
the limitations of the scale, for the usual ratio in plotting townlands of
one or two hundred acres was forty Irish perches to the inch, very close
to the six-inch scale by which the Ordnance Survey's minutely detailed
findings were to be laid down a century later. Many cartographers were as
modestly sparing with decorative embellishment as they were with information, framing their maps in a single band of colour and using words
rather than drawings to express the facts of scale and orientation. Others
added compass indicators, cartouches and scale bars in the contemporary
idiom, but except where they were printed from plates these marginal
features were generally crude in execution and unsophisticated in design.
It is lucky for the cartographic historian that most old land surveys
are signed and dated, for their style was widely distributed in both time
and space. Its elements were common to the strictly functional maps
attached to leases and other legal documents and to the elaborate albums
intended for the landowner's library ; and it found equal favour with
country practitioners—many of them part-time map-makers, confined to
a localised ' service area '—and with the handful of Dublin instrument
makers and mathematical teachers who came nearest to ranking as heads
of the profession. Paradoxically, the essential unity that linked these
men is made clear not only by their maps but by the public controversies
in which so many of them were involved. Surveyors challenged each other
to wagers, threatened each other with legal or even physical reprisals, and
accused each other of falsifying their results (to favour either lessor or
lessee), twisting their rivals' compass needles and similar malpractices.
Yet captious though they were, they hardly ever disagreed about the value,
quality or topography of the land under survey : what mattered was the
bare acreage, and this mattered so much that differences as small as one
or two per cent could be hotly disputed. The same impression, of limited
cartographic aims combined with measuring techniques of high potential
accuracy, persists when one turns from the virulent sub-literature of the
newspaper advertisements to the small number of technical manuals
produced by eighteenth-century Irish writers. They begin in 1724 with
276
Thomas Burgh's system for dispensing with paper computation and
determining the area of a closed traverse directly from field notes, a
refinement sufficiently close to contemporary needs to earn its author a
parliamentary grant of one thousand pounds.2 And the writers who followed Burgh in the middle years of the century had little to say about any
kind of triangulation : they seem to have pictured the reader as carrying
the chain from point to point around the outer boundary of each parcel,
at the same time taking the angles between successive stations by means
of the theodolite or, more usually, the circumferentor.3 No doubt the
blank appearance of many Irish estate maps was part cause and pait
consequence of their authors' devotion to this one particular survey
technique.
Perhaps more than any others, indeed, such maps may be described as
characteristically Irish. The method of making them was transmitted
inside the country and often inside the family by men who were generally
without experience of land surveying as practised across the channel.4
Their national roots do not seem to go very deep, however, for one finds
no major regional variants (such as might be expected to have developed
in the course of a long process of evolution) and English personal names
become more common as the history of the map-making profession is
traced backwards, until a probable line of descent is picked up running
through the official admeasurements carried out by imported surveyors at
various times before 1703. The best known of these, Dr. William Petty's
Down Survey, had played a key part, recognised by statute (14 & 15 Car.
II, c.2 ; 17 & 18 Car. II, c.2), in the formation of many Anglo-Irish
properties, and it was standard practice for the local land surveyor to
help settle disputes by putting his techniques into reverse and tracing
out the Down Survey boundaries on the ground. To facilitate these
proceedings, the official maps were supplied by the Surveyor-general's
department to interested persons for a small fee and copies of them are
often found among the papers of land-owning families. They forged a
link between public and private cartography which manifests itself in the
style,5 subject-matter and often the wording of the maps themselves,
and which is sometimes equally evident from their signatures : to mention
only one of several such instances, the early eighteenth-century estate
surveyor Thomas Moland is first recorded as a ' protractor ' of the official
Trustees Survey of 1700-3,6 an operation which seems to have been conducted very much in the manner of the Down Survey half a century earlier.
The men employed on Irish plantation surveys by the Cromwell'an and
other British governments could have offered two good reasons for their
attenuated style of map-making: the need to get through a great quantity
of work in a short time, and the paucity of mappable detail in a war-torn
277
(and in any case never very well developed) countryside. With the
progress of improvement in the eighteenth century, mere outline maps
were losing their justification, but no local cartographer seemed able to
break the mould of custom. Landlords who wanted something more
truly topographical could, and probably did, import their own experts
specially for the purpose, but until 1754 none of these visitors is known
to have left any lasting imprint on the Irish scene.
The Anglo-French cartographer John Rocque (c. 1705-1762) was
already well known for having surveyed London, Paris and Rome when,
at the suggestion of a number of Irish noblemen and gentlemen, he
undertook to do the same for Dublin. He seems to have been preceded
by his associate Andrew Dury, who set up shop at the Golden Hart,
Dame Street, in the summer of 1754 (15.6.54), probably to conduct some
preliminary market research and perhaps to help organise the beginnings
of the survey. By August Rocque himself was in residence (27.8.54)' and
his flair for publicity was soon demonstrated when two of his cham-men
were nearly drowned while measuring a base on the foreshore in the
neighbourhood of Irishtown (10.9.54). Subsequent operations proceeded
without further mishap and Rocque's Indian ink drawings were ready for
inspection about two months later (23.11.54). The remarkable speed
of the survey, and indeed the whole timing of his visit, may have been
related to the fact that the corporation's official surveyor, Roger Kendrick,
had been planning to map the city himself. The ensuing newspaper battle
was unusually polite, but it dragged on for three months (10.9.54—
17.12.54) until Kendrick, in spite of offering to increase his scale and
decrease his price, was finally outgunned. Indeed there was no contemporary Irishman with enough experience of the printed map to match
Rocque at public relations and marketing techniques, let alone at cartography proper. Part of his strategy was always to be ready with some
well-advertised flattery of Dublin and Dubliners ; 8 he also had the advantage of a shop, first at the Golden Hart and later (29.7.55) in Bachelors
Walk, where potential customers could inspect his previous output and
draw their own conclusions ; and for a cartographer he showed himself
disarmingly anxious to take the public into his confidence on technical
matters. Not least, his own presence in the city seemed to betoken a
genuine willingness to invest time and talent in the cause of Irish mapmaking, and so did his promise that the survey party would be staying on
in Dublin to engrave the finished map (26.10.54). At one point he had
to call on the corporation for support 9 but on the whole his visit went off
278
remarkably well : it was certainly a succès d'estime and perhaps the only
successful self-employed professional visit ever made to Ireland by a
cartographer of European repute. When after six years he returned
to London (19.8.60) his Dublin productions stood as follows :
(1) The town and camp of Thurles. About five inches to one English
mile. Drawn by J. Powell, engraved by J. Perret. 1755.
(2) The city and environs of Dublin. About five inches to one English
mile. Engraved by J. J. Perret. [1756]. A marginal note reads :
' This plan is to be followed by that of the city and suburbs in
four sheets '.
(3) The city and suburbs of Dublin. Two hundred feet to an inch.
Four sheets. Engraved by A. Dury. With a separate index. 1756.
(4) The city and suburbs of Dublin ' with the divisions of the parishes,
reduced from the large plan in four sheets '. Twenty Irish perche?
to an inch. Engraved by P. Halpin. 1757.
(5) The city, harbour, bay and environs of Dublin. About five inches
to one English mile. Four sheets. 1757. The central sheet is a
later state of (2) above, with the addition of river depths and the
outer administrative boundary of the city;
(6) A pocket plan of the city and suburbs of Dublin. About 6J
inches to one English mile. Engraved by P. Halpin. 1757.
(7) The city of Kilkenny. Two hundred feet to an inch. Engraved by
G. Byrne. 1758.
(8) The city and suburbs of Cork. Two hundred feet to an inch. 1759.
(9) The county of Armagh, with inset town plans of Armagh and
Newry. Two inches to one Irish mile. Four sheets. 1760.
(10) The county of Dublin. Two inches to one English mile. Four
sheets. 1760.
(11) The kingdom of Ireland. About 8J English miles to an inch.
Four sheets. In production, 1759 (18.12.59).
To these may be added the four-sheet map of the harbours of Cork and
Kinsale, on the scale of two inches to one English mile, which Rocque
intended for publication in January 1761 (12.2.60) but which was apparently never finished. The most notable of his Irish achievements was the
third item on the foregoing list, the large and—even by European standards—uniquely detailed (13.5.55) plan of Dublin, which King George II
found so expressive that he ordered it to be hung in his own apartment
(1.1.57). But except for the last (a conventional general map) each of the
works listed above was notable for its rich carpet of detail and ornament,
fulfilling the author's initial promise to bring ' t h e same method of
engraving topographical maps into this kingdom as he formerly brought
into England' (26.10.54). While both the maps and the method are too
279
well known to need describing at length, it may be useful to quote some of
Rocque's technical bints that do not seem to have been recorded elsewhere. Of his two Irish county maps he wrote : ' The method of asserting
the principal objects in those surveys, is by trigonometrical observations ;
the angles taken by the theodolite and distances measured by a four pole
chain ; and for greater accuracy, this work was laid down by a scale of
four inches tc a mile, and now reduced to two, by which means the least
objects are expressed, and not one cabin omitted ' (9.10.59). And of his
projected map of Cork and Kinsale : ' The method observed in asserting
the churches, and principal objects in their true positions, is by trigonometrical observations ; the bendings of the roads, rivers and sea coast
measured with the chain, and the angles taken with the theodolite '
(12.2.60). He does not claim to have measured fences with the chain, and
although in both the above-mentioned cases he proposed to ' express '
walls, pales and hedges, it seems unlikely that the fields on his Irish county
maps are intended to be taken literally :10 they certainly do not stand up
to comparison with the detailed field-by-field surveys, now in the Pembroke estates office, Dublin, which Jonathan Barker made in 1762 of
some half-dozen townlands on the south-east side of the city.
In his English advertising, Rocque had undertaken the ' land-surveying
and planning of gentlemen's estates ' u , without apparently having done
many such surveys except in the special case of parks and gardens.
Apart from recommending his engraved plan of Dublin for use in conjunction with rent rolls and leases (13.5.55) n e does not appear to have offered
the same service to his new public and it has only recently transpired that
between printed maps he was producing some of the most remarkable
manuscript estate surveys ever made in Ireland. The Earl of Kildare's
great house at Carton was distinguished in several of the fine arts as one
of the growth-points of the Georgian mode. Rocque was the nearest
cartographic equivalent to architects like Richard Castle and decorators
like the Francini brothers and it is not surprising that the Earl (who
ordered five sets of the published plan of Dublin12) should have summoned
him to map the newly landscaped demesne at Carton and the rich
Kildare manors that stretched away southwards to Castledermot and
beyond (Fig. 1). In the eight volumes of these maps, completed by Rocque
and his staff at various times between 1755 and 1760, the Irish estate
album was given a worthy format : first came the title page, with local
views supplementing or displacing the classical columns and allegorical
figures of an earlier generation ; then the small-scale index map of the
whole manor ; then the plan of the demesne or the manorial village ;
and finally the individual maps of each townland or denomination. On
the latter, relief is shown by hachures in grey or brown, water (including
280
IO miles
Mona:
E U WOODSTOCK 1755-56
ATHY 1756
E53 .KILDARE 1757
E 3 MAYNOOTH 1757
EZ2 CASTLEDERMOT 1758
ETJ GRANEY 1758
E3
KILKEA 1760
CHI RATHANGAN I76O
Fig. 1. John Rocque's Kildare estate maps.
The eight volumes were sold and dispersed in 1963. Woodstock is now in the British
Museum (Add. MS 52293), Maynooth in the University Library, Cambridge (MS
Plans 690). So far as can be ascertained, the remaining volumes are in private hands.
The maps of Maynooth town and Carton demesne were reproduced in Jour. Co.
Kildare Arch. Soc. 1 (1891-95), p. 236 and 4 (1903-5), p. 19 respectively. There are
microfilms of all the maps in the National Library, Dublin (P. 4032). No other Irish
estate maps by Rocque are now known, but one of his advertisements referred to
' numerous actual surveys in many parts of the kingdom' (18.12.59) and Charles
Brassington, a later member of the French school, said that ' his private surveys are
generally about the year 1758 ' (Ordnance Survey office, Dublin : Kilkenny ' memorandums ', 29 July 1841), which may suggest that there were others.
281
ditches) by a blue wash. Buildings, in block plan, are coloured pale carmine and shaded on two sides. Arable land is usually brown, with parallel
lines of stipple to give the effect of cultivation. Meadow and pasture
are shown in light green, woods and orchards by the usual tree symbols
and bog by patches of brown and green with appropriate vegetation. A
line of bushes denotes a quickset hedge ; other fences are shown by a kind
of herring-bone device, seen also on Rocque's engraved plans, which here
seems to stand for an. earthen bank without a hedge.13 There are also
springs, mills, quarries, forges, pigeon houses, prehistoric forts, some
field names and a few hill names. The detail, including the bends and
junctions of interior fences, looks comprehensive and appears from a
few sample checks to be as accurate as the historian is likely to require,
with common boundaries carefully assimilated. It could have been surveyed by a mixture of theodolite triangulation and chain triangulation.
Rocque's border is a plain double line, his scale a simple checkered bar.
His earlier north points are equally unobtrusive, but after 1757 they break
into fantasy, with putti flying meridian lines as kites, shooting them from
bows and using them as see-saws or balancing poles. Reference panels,
which give the use of each field as well as its acreage, are drawn to look
like carelessly-torn scraps of paper. Cartouches are more ambitious,
featuring both naturalistic scenery and rococo decoration, either separately or in mixtures of increasing complexity and audacity. Some of the
scenes are real, with the artist's viewpoint indicated by a reference letter
on, the map (Plate 1). Others are imaginative pictures of farm and village
life : one shows what looks like an Irish ' faction fight ' in which cherubic
figures are seen beating each other with sticks. By avoiding bright colours
Rocque prevents these marginal features from taking charge of the map ;
by arranging them asymmetrically he draws the reader's eye towards the
centre of the page.
In English cartographic history part of Rocque's importance, according
to Lynam14, was to bring the conventions of manuscript estate cartography on to the topographical map. In Ireland he also faced the more
elementary task of bringing the same conventions on to the estate map.
Almost the only traditional feature of the Kildare albums is the outer
ring of marginal townland names and boundary junction symbols : the
interior has been refashioned to make what may well have been the first
of a number of related attempts, by late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury surveyors, at a complete cartographic record of an Irish landscape.
From a comparative study of these men and their predecessors (as far
as this is possible with the information at present available) Rocque
seems to emerge as one of the great innovators of estate map making in
Ireland. This at all events was the picture accepted within the profession,
282
for whom three generations later his ' French school ' was still distinguishable from the ordinary run of Irish practitioners.
The genealogy of Rocque's influence, though clear enough along its
central axis, is rather blurred about the edges. Some surveyors failed to
apply what they had learned in his employment, others picked up the
elements of his system from the outside. Jonathan Barker's maps of
1762, mentioned above, may be thought to place him in the second
category, but since he is known to have been active in Dublin as early as
1749 (23.549) it *s possible that he acquired their Rocque-like style from
some other source. Another example, this time from the field of published
maps, is the Wicklow surveyor Jacob Nevill, who agreed in 1754 to provide
his local Grand Jury with a topographical county map (14.9.54). Nevill's
decision to use distinctive ornament for grass and corn ground (which
had not been among the numerous details promised in his original advertisement) could easily have been inspired by reading Rocque's proposals
or visiting his shop. At any rate the results, engraved at three-quarters
of an inch to a mile by the same George Byrne who engraved Rocque's
Kilkenny, were unmistakably Rocquian, though financially the experience
seems to have been unhappy and Nevill's next appearance was when he
broke into verse (14.3.61), an unwilling lessor of his Wicklow farm :
' As the county of Wicklow I did survey,
I must now quit my hold for want of my pay '.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the affair (and Nevill later withdrew
his complaint with a distressingly abject apology (13.6.61)), it cannot have
helped the cause of Irish topography. Only one other county map, to
be noticed shortly, shows clear traces of ' French ' influence ; and apart
from the work of known members of the school there seems to be only
one such town plan, J. Connor's plan of Cork (1774).
Of the men who can be proved to have assisted in Rocque's Irish
surveys, three set up in business on their own account in 1760, quoting
their employer's testimonial and offering, in the true spirit of the master,
to undertake ' kingdoms, provinces, counties, cities, gentlemen's estates,
etc., in the most accurate manner, best method and at reasonable rates '
(12.1.60). As it turned out none of the three achieved very much. The
first, Samuel Andrews, is known only as the possible author of a chart of
Cork harbour more than thirty years later. John Powell, who had drawn
Rocque's plan of Thurles, made effective use of his late chief's style in a
survey of Lord Shelbume's Kerry estates dated 1764 but is not heard of
again in Ireland.15 Only Matthew Wren16 got as far as a county and that
283
was the smallest. His map of Louth, commissioned by the Grand Jury
in 1763 (16.8.63) a nd published three years later, was evidently based
on the Rocque-Nev'll model but fell short of it by omitting the symbols
for arable and grassland ; it was also sadly inaccurate and does not seem
to have done much to advance its author's cartographical career. It is
not known how many other men had worked for Rocque in Dublin (his
London staff had numbered at least ten17) or how many of them he left
behind, but since he arranged to take all his stock away with him we may
assume that he was without direct business successors. In all other
respects, however, the line of descent is unmistakable. Beside Peter
Bernard Scale (b.1739) the surveyors named above are dwarfed into
insignificance. Like Rocque, Scale came from a Huguenot family domiciled in England and like Rocque he declared his origin by giving some of
his maps French as well as English titles. He was one of the subscribers
to the 1756 plan of Dublin and his own first cartographical appearance,
in the following year, is on a manuscript map that bears both men's
names.18 W. G. Strickland, in compiling his Dictionary of Irish artists
(1913), found evidence that Scale was both pupil and brother-in-law to
Rocque and had been employed by him in the survey of Dublin.19 Even
if none of this were known, the similarity of their work would be enough
to suggest a strong connection.
For Scale, map-making occupied a central position on a topographical
spectrum that ran from pure accountancy to pure art, from his published
valuation tables to the landscapes which he exhibited to societies of
artists in Dublin and London. With interests of such breadth he was well
equipped to follow Rocque in the role of universal map-provider, and his
varied (though quantitatively limited) output suggests that for a time
at least he cherished this ambition. In collaboration with William
Richards he published plans and views of buildings, a ' curious map of
Ireland for a watch case' (1762) ,20 two stylish plans of the city and environs
of Waterford (1764) and, with the help of a ' marine theodolite ' invented
by Richards, a number of charts.21 Their survey of the coast from Balbriggan to Wicklow head (1765), in particular, was something of a triumph,
for it passed a stiff instrumental test devised by the Dublin committee
of merchants. Nevertheless Scale soon decided to narrow his scope. No
doubt the accident of his partner's death in 1766 is sufficient to explain
this change of policy, but it was an interesting moment in Ireland's
cartographic history all the same. As Rocque seems to have appreciated,
county map making was an obvious foundation for national map making
on both sides of the Irish sea. But even without Rocque the middle of
the eighteenth century would have been a promising period in this respect,
for in addition to the publications listed in Miss E. M. Rodger's Large scale
284
•county maps of the British Isles,"2 there are reports of surveys of Meath
{2.9.49)23 and King's county24 and of projects for survey ing Tipperary
(5.6.53) and Kilkenny (18.10.60). In 1760 the Dublin Society took note
of the new trend by resolving to purchase all maps of counties ' that are
lately published, or that shall be published \ 25 With the appearance of
Wren's Louth, seven had found their way into print, all in east-central
Ireland, though with the possible exception of Oliver Sloane no Irishman
seemed to be emerging as a specialist in county cartography. It may
thus be significant that for all his talent and energy Scale failed to extend
this cartographic ' English pale ' and that his most productive years
actually coincided with a lull in topographic publication on large and
medium scales. Apart from his revisions of Rocque's Dublin plans in
1773 and 1787 his last printed contributions were the elegant county
maps of the Hibernian atlas (1776) and these, though commercially successful, were too small and simplified to be relevant in the present context.
Issued at a time when he was turning more of his attention to England,
they might almost be interpreted as an admission of defeat, a valedictory
throwback to the kind of mini-atlas produced by Herman Moll nearly
half a century earlier. As Ireland moved into a decade of specialist
chart-makers, road surveyors and military topographers, Scale may have
felt that its cartography was returning to a familiar pattern of ad hoc
utilitarianism in which the experts, many of them transient visitors,
«ach concentrated on maps of one particular kind. If one looks far enough
ahead, such a forecast can be made to seem unduly pessimistic. The
fact remains, nevertheless, that map-making for the cartographic equivalent of the ' general reader ' has never flourished in Ireland for very long
at a time. Rocque and Scale are among its most distinguished exponents.
Given the trend towards specialisation, the most inviting speciality for
Scale himself was the manuscript estate survey, a field in which his quickly
maturing talents as draughtsman and colourist had already been evident
in the early sixties and in which the rapid pace of building and improvement was now creating many opportunities. After Richards's death it
became his principal interest and in an atlas of the manor of Ardglass,
county Down (1768), he declared himself ready to survey and value land
in any part of the British Isles. By addressing this offer to a private
client he may have been hinting (not without justification) that his work
was good enough to deserve handing round from one admirer to another.
Later, like Rocque, he came to see the power of the pres.^ and used the
Freeman's Journal to commend his system to ' noblemen and landed
proprietors who are desirous of improving their estates and increasing the
yeomanry of Ireland ', meanwhile paving the way for future expansion
by offering an apprenticeship to ' one of the most profitable and genteel
285
professions'.26 The expansion, as it gathered momentum, may have
been at some points a little too fast for smoothness. In the following year
Scale was under attack for an overcharge of three acres, ' which is a
demonstration ' (his anonymous critic neatly remarked) ' of Mr. Sc—1-e's
infallible ability of increasing the yeomanry of Ireland as he sets forth
in his puffing advertisements>27. Genteel or not, the Irish surveying
profession still had its hazards.
But this incident, and the jealousy that drew attention to it, did not
prevent Scale from strengthening the metropolitan element in an industry
which, like its market, had hitherto been widely dispersed. By 1772
(a year in which he gained further publicity by having one of his estate
surveys printed in the Dublin Society's Experiments in agriculture) he
was ranging if not over the whole British Isles at least over many of the
more affluent parts of Ireland, and with an increasing emphasis on album
production the limits of his sphere of influence were becoming social
rather than territorial. With Irish estate records in their present condition
it would be premature to try to list all the properties he surveyed, but
they are known to have been scattered over at least seventeen counties.2*
Perhaps as a step towards building up the cross-channel side of the business
he addressed a specific appeal to Irish proprietors resident in Britain,
promising them ' at one view . . . the topographical appearance of the
whole \ 29 Absentee patrons must certainly have found the view a reassuring one, impressively detailed and accurate-looking and yet at the
same time carrying an aura of lush plenty and idyllic rural peace. For
some tastes indeed the Rocque-Scalé style may have been rather too
lush : it was an extravagance, after all, to colour each field so painstakingly
with the state of cultivation in one particular season. Scale met this
objection by developing two ' editions ', one fully and the other partly
coloured, of which the latter might be regarded as an immigrant's adaptation to indigenous cartography, putting the emphasis back on to the townland boundary and restricting interior detail to those more durable features
like roads, buildings and quarries, that were plainly relevant to the valuation of the land. In public collections the second, outline style is the more
common, but for some estates both versions are known to have been
supplied ; one for use, no doubt, the other for show.
Another local adaptation was Scale's use of ' plantation ' units, his
most common scales being twenty and sixteen Irish perches to the inch.
Otherwise he elaborated the ' torn paper ' cartouche and developed the
north point as a focus of decoration.30 His penmanship was finer than
Rocque's, his tree symbols more luxuriant, his effects of light and shade
more sharply contrasted (Plate 2), and his colours blended with more
conscious artistry, hills for instance being represented by darker shades
286
oí the colours used for arable and grass. Thus despite their basic similarity
of aims and methods, the two cartographers differ in their ambience, for
while Rocque charms with his freedom and high spirits, Scale (though he
has his lighter moments) awes with a display of technical mastery which
at times seems almost aggressive. Nor is it only in an Irish context that
his gifts stand out : back in England he produced maps of estates in Essex
and Sussex that have attracted special attention from the scholars of those
counties31.
After maintaining business addresses on both sides of the channel for
some years, Scale finally disappeared from the Irish trade directories at
the end of 1779. Three of his apprentices are recorded—James Asser,
Thomas Sherrard and John Brownrigg. The first is known in Ireland only
for a delicately executed map of Phoenix Park (now in the American
embassy building, Dublin) but the other two (14.4.74) played an essential
part in transmitting their master's legacy through a succession of partnerships which is recorded as follows in the contemporary Dublin directories :
Scale & Richards, Georges Lane, 1763-67*
Bernard Scale, Lower Abbey St, 1768-73
Scale, Sherrardf & Brownrigg,
123 Lower Abbey St, 1774-77
Bernard Scale,
2 Essex Bridge,
1778-79
Sherrard & Brownrigg, 123 Lower Abbey St, 1778
Thomas Sherrard,
138 Abbey St, 1779-82,
60 Capel St, 1783-1800
John Brownrigg,
63 Grafton St, 1779
64 Grafton St, 1780-1800
Sherrard & Brassington,
1 Blessington St, 1801-12
John Brownrigg & Co,§
64 Grafton St, 1801-9
Sherrard, Brassington & Greene, John Longfield,
1 Blessington St, 1813-28
67 Grafton St, 1810-25
19 Harcourt St, 1826-36
Sherrard, Brassington & Gale,
72 Blessington St, 1829-31
William Longfield,
19 Harcourt St, 1837-54
Brassington & Gale,
24 Lower Dominick St, 1832-43
Various addresses, 1844-1902
* The dates are those of the directories, which were presumably compiled in the
year preceding their date of imprint, and then not necessarily from up-to-date
information.
† Sherrard was in business on his own account for a brief period between spells
as Scalé's apprentice and as his partner (Hibernian Journal, 24 March 1773).
§ Some maps of this period are signed ' Brownrigg, Longfield and Murray ".
For Murray, see page 3 of the article cited in note 24.
287
Since Brownrigg and Sherrard made no sustained attempt to work for
publication, their careers may be said to mark a further weakening of the
impetus of 1754. Instead, Brownrigg specialised in surveys for inland
navigation while Sherrard became surveyor and secretary to the Dublin
Wide Streets Commission and won the honour of having a street named
after him. Both continued to map and value private estates, however,
and their two firms held commanding positions in this field well into the
nineteenth century. Thus in 1824 the French school, of which Sherrard,
Brassington and Greene were now the recognised leaders, could be described as ' the most respectable in the surveying and valuing of land in the
kingdom ', even if its methods had come to seem rather old-fashioned, by
this time, to the new generation of surveyors who had settled in Ireland
after working for the government's Bogs Commission in 1809-13.32
Stylistically, however, the school had lost some of its appeal. Brownrigg
was still ready, in the 1790s, to augment a Scale atlas with some flamboyant land-use maps of his own,33 but his successor John Longfield seems
usually to have preferred a simpler approach, emphasising bogs and
hills while leaving enclosures uncoloured. Perhaps he was showing the
influence of the plain-looking topographical maps favoured by the Bogs
Commission, for whom he did a number of surveys at about the same time
as he took over from Brownrigg. On the other hand Richard Brassington,
who was also employed by the Bogs Commission, produced his estate
maps in a watered-down version of the Rocque-Scalé manner. As topographical evidence, the maps of the later Sherrard partnerships were as
good as ever, but by Scale's high standards their colours were unattractively mottled, their land use ornament a pattern of mere lines and blobs,
and their marginal decoration perfunctory and uninspired.
While both these firms practised in many parts of Ireland, most of their
work was done in the counties nearest Dublin34 and it was here, as with
the previous generation, that the French mode can be seen radiating
outwards from the group that is known to have inherited it directly.
The following (with examples from the National Library noted in brackets)
are some of the contemporaries of Sherrard and Brownrigg whose work
seems relevant in this connection : Samuel Byron of Eustace Street, a
product of the Dublin Society's drawing school and like Scale a landscape
artist of exhibition standard35, who held the key post of city surveyor in
the eighties and early nineties (21.F.18) ; Francis Matthews of Marrowbone Lane, who at the same period was developing a robust hybrid version
•of the old style and the new (21.F.31) ; Thomas Logan of north King
Street (16.G.42); and, on one occasion at least, John Magennis of Kilcock,
county Kildare, who had been Scale's antagonist in the affair of the three
-acres (21.F.78). To copy Scale was not necessarily to assimilate him,
288
however. Charles Frizell and his sons Charles and Richard were unusually
productive and well-travelled but otherwise typical country surveyors
from north Wexford who in the seventies took to putting grass and furrow
symbols on maps which in other respects preserved much of their authors'
earlier, ' Irish ' manner.36 The results are plausible enough at first sight,
but it is not clear how much attention should be paid to the shapes and.
boundaries of the fields, for on one page a Frizell atlas may describe as
' well divided ' a farm that appears on the opposite page as a patch of
arable and a patch of grass with no fence between them (MS 679). The
same problem is posed by the contemporary and closely similar work of
Michael Kenny (21.F.108), who captions both symbols together as ' arable
and pasture ' as if wishing to remain non-committal about the limits of
individual plots.
Behind Kenny and the Frizells stood a large body of surveyors, most
of them in the provinces, whose work remained almost untouched by
Dublin fashions ; indeed it is possible that more pre-Rocque maps, in the
stylistic sense, were made after Rocque's visit than before it. In the course
of the nineteenth century, however, it becomes harder to distinguish
' French ' from ' Irish '. The former description could still be applied
to maps by James Serry (21.F.50), by James Vaughan of Athboy37, and,
as late as the 1840s, by Clarges Greene of Dominick Street (16.G.42), as
well as to some of the early manuscript town plans of the Irish Ordnance
Survey. But in the Survey's better known six-inch, maps (1833-46) and
elsewhere, anonymous modern influences were now clearly observable,
more redolent of the civil engineer than the old style artist-topographer,
and doubtless more in tune with the period of agricultural readjustment
that followed the Napoleonic wars. The new trend in estate maps was for
fences to appear as unornamented lines, for arable and grass to be left
undifferentiated, for hachures to be omitted, and for decoration to be
confined to the use of fancy writing in the main title. Brassington's firm
seems to have fallen into line after about 1830, perhaps as a result of
further changes in the composition of the partnership. This, in the
present state of research, may be said to mark the effective end of the
French school as a combined phenomenon of business and stylistic history.
During the next two decades, in any case, it became cheaper to get a
property map by enlarging the appropriate six-inch Ordnance sheets than
by calling in a private surveyor. A considerable share of this new kind
of ready-made estate cartography was captured by the Dublin booksellers
Hodges and Smith. Another share went to the Ordnance Survey itself
when it began in 1859 to supply the Landed Estates Court with large-scale
replots from its six-inch field books. The private surveying profession
survived, diminished in importance and changed in character, only ta
289
face a new threat thirty years later from the series of land reforms in
which the Irish estate system gave way to a regime of owner occupation.
To ease the transition, the Treasury in 1887 authorised an official survey
at 1/2500 of all the improved land in Ireland. When this great undertaking
seemed to be slow in getting into its stride, Brassington and Gale offered
the Ordnance Survey a helping hand in the shape of some of their own
maps.38 Needless to say, this brave gesture was not very warmly received
and it was a foregone conclusion that once the 1/2500 survey gathered
speed the last of the ' French ' firms would have to admit defeat. Their
final appearance in the trade directories was in 1902, nearly a century and
a half after Rocque first came to Dublin.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1
2
Colley estate maps. National Library, Dublin. MS 9212, pp. 82-83.
Thomas Burgh, A method to determine the areas of right lined figures universally
very useful for ascertaining the contents of any survey, 1724. For Burgh's grant, see
Commons
Journals, Ireland, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 322, 327, 333.
3
Peter Callan, A dissertation on the practice of land surveying in Ireland and an
essay towards a general regulation therein in two parts, 1758 (the first part appears to
have been originally published in 1750). Robert Gibson, A treatise of practical
surveying, 1752 (second edition, 1763). Benjamin Noble, Geodaesia Hibernica, 1768.
Jacob Nevill wrote two books that seem to have remained unpublished : ' Mr.
Nevill's treatise of surveying, showing everything useful in that art, particularly
eight new and much more concise methods of calculating (to determine the contents
of surveys from field notes) than any heretofore made public ' (7.9.54), and ' Nevill's
tables of ninety pages . . . for determining the areas of surveys from field notes '
(2.3.62).
4
Of a sample of 323 Irish surveyors active before 1770 only eleven have been
identified, few of them conclusively, in English records. Dr. P.M.G. King kindly
collated this sample with Mr. Francis Steer's dictionary of English surveyors, which
is now being continued in the department of English local history at the University
of Leicester. The author is indebted to Mr. Steer and Dr. King for further information
about
the English careers of the surveyors discussed in this paper.
5
This point is made by F.H.A. Aalen and R.J. Hunter in ' The estate maps of
Trinity
College ', Hermathena, 98 (1964), p. 87.
6
Annesley MS 38 (National Library, Microfilm P.276). Estate maps by Moland
are7 to be found in some half-dozen collections.
Also reported in the Universal Advertiser (24.8.54), which refers to Rocque as
' Mr. Recoue '. The Scottish surveyor Alexander Nimmo later said that the French
engineers had come to Ireland in about 1752, adding mysteriously, ' That is the
earliest map we have ' (Minutes, Select committee on the survey and valuation of
Ireland, 1824, p. 76). But in the index to his map of Dublin, issued in November
1756 (27.11.56), Rocque claimed only to have lived in the city for ' above two years '
(quoted by B.P.Bowen, ' John Rocque's maps of Dublin ', Dublin Historical Record,
9 (1947-48),
p. 118).
8
Proposals for the map of Dublin, 5 September 1754. Proof copy, with corrections,
in 9the library of Trinity College Dublin. Bowen, loc. cit.
Calendar of ancient records of the city of Dublin, Vol. 10, p. 252 (21.1.57). The
corporation made Rocque a grant of twenty guineas for which he thanked them in
the10 pages of the Dublin Journal (29.1.57).
The field boundaries on Rocque's English county maps have been discussed in
connection with R.A.Skelton's paper, ' The origins of the Ordnance Survey of Great
Britain ', Geogr. Jour. 128 (1962), pp. 428-29. The subject is further considered, with
references to earlier literature, by Paul Laxton in ' John Rocque's survey of Berkshire,
1761 ', Jour. Durham University Geogr. Soc. 8 (1965-66), pp. 41-49.
290
11
H.Phillips, ' John Rocque's career ', London Topographical Record, 20 (1953),
p. 2 1 .
12
A copy of Rocque's printed list of subscribers, containing 363 names, is in the
library of Trinity College. 452 sets were subscribed for.
13
The author is indebted to Dr. R.H. Buchanan, who has studied this and other
fence symbols in estate maps of county Down, for his opinion on this point.
14
E. Lynam, British maps and map-makers, 1944, p. 32.
15
Marquis of Lansdowne, Glanerought ad the Petty-Fitzmaurices, 1937, pp. 59-60,
with a reproduction of Powell's map of Nedeen (Kenmare).
16
Wren's surname appears on a view of Bolton House in the Kildare estate maps.
He also made a plan of Newry in 1761 (PRO Belfast, T.618/327).
17
J. Varley, ' John Rocque : engraver, surveyor, cartographer and map-seller ',
Imago Mundi, 5 (1948), p. 85.
18
' An exact copy taken of an original survey of a map in the auditor's office of the
town and lands of Fethard in the barony of Middlethird and county of Tipperary,
drawn by John Rocque. March 4th 1757. P. Barnard Scalé '. National Library, 21.
F. 55 (10). The map is a line drawing without stylistic interest except for reference
and title panels of the ' torn paper ' variety favoured by Rocque.
19
Strickland, though generally considered reliable, gives no sources for individual
entries, and his authority for this statement (and for the statement that Scalé's
partner William Richards died in 1766) is not known. It can be confirmed, however,
that Rocque married [Mary] Anne Bew in 1751 (Varley, loc. cit.) and that Scalé's
sister Mary Anne had married one Edward Bew at some time before 1743 (Huguenot
Society of London, Wagner collection: Scalé).
20
Sleator's Gazette, 4 J a n u a r y 1763.
21
Freeman's Journal, 10 J u l y 1764. Besides t h e c h a r t of t h e coast from Balbriggan
to Wicklow head (1765) w i t h separate sailing directions a n d plans of individual
harbours, Scalé a n d Richards produced a plan of Wexford harbour from a survey b y
Joseph Allen (1764) a n d a chart of t h e coast from Balbriggan t o T a r a hill in c o u n t y
Wexford (1766). Their ' d r a u g h t of Waterford h a r b o u r ' w a s noticed i n t h e Dublin
Journal for 27 March 1764. D.A. Beaufort i n h i s Memoir of a map of Ireland, 1792,
p. viii, mentions Scalé's surveys of t h e rivers Shannon, Boyne a n d Brosna.
22
Dublin, b y G. Stokes, 1750 ; Kildare, b y J. Noble a n d J . Keenan, 1752 ; Down, b y
J. Gillies, 1755 ; Wicklow, b y J . Nevill, 1760 . Miss Rodger (p. 41) places Oliver
Sloane's u n d a t e d m a p of Queen's c o u n t y in 1789, b u t Beaufort, writing i n 1792
(op. cit. p. vii) states that it was engraved ' about thirty years ago '. It may have
been the map of the county that the Dublin Society considered buying, at the suggestion of Charles Vallancey, in 1764 (Dub. Soc. Proc. 1 (1764), pp. 2, 5).
23
Beaufort (op. cit. p. viii) mentions Sloane's map of Meath without giving its
date.
24
Tracings from ' Mooney's m a p of King's c o u n t y ' a r e a m o n g t h e Downshire
estate m a p s (E.R.R. Green, 'A catalogue of t h e estate m a p s e t c . in t h e Downshire
office, Hillsborough, Co. Down [now i n t h e P R O Belfast] ', Ulster Jour. Arch. 12
(1949), p . 15). T h e surveyor J o h n Mooney of Geashill, King's county, flourished in
t h e 1740s a n d 1750s.
25
Dublin Society minutes, 27 N o v e m b e r 1760.
26
Freeman's Journal, 13 J a n u a r y 1770.
27
Ibid, 25 J u n e 1771.
28
M a n y of Scalé's m a p s a r e listed i n R . J . H a y e s (ed.), Manuscript
sources for the
history of Irish civilisation,
1965, V o l . 4, p p . 385-86. T h e r e a r e m o r e in t h e N a t i o n a l
Library, Dublin, the University Library, Cambridge, the Devonshire collection at
Chatsworth and at least one other private collection. To judge from recorded examples his Irish estate work falls into the period 1759-82 and his most active years
were from 1771 to 1776.
29
Bernard Scalé, Tables for the easy valuing of estates, 1771.
30
For illustrations see G. C. Duggan, ' An old Irish estate map ', Geogr. Mag. 27
(1954-55), pp. 359-63.
31
F.G. Emmison, A catalogue of maps in the Essex Record Office, 1566-1855, 1947,
pp. 23-24 and Plate IV. F.W. Steer, A catalogue of Sussex estate and tithe award
maps, 1962, pp. vii, 61.
32
One of the Bogs Commission surveyors, Alexander Nimmo, said of Rocque and
his successors : ' His science not being such as subsequent operations have introduced,
these persons still work with the old instruments, the needle or circumferentor, and,
29I
in the case of canal operations, the level ' (loc. cit.). But Rocque himself claimed to
have used the theodolite.
33
Drogheda estate maps. National Library, 21.F.10.
34
T h e Longfield collection in t h e National Library includes letters, valuations and
other documents (MSS 859-64) and some 1500 working maps b y Longfield, Brownriggand others. T h e maps cover parts of twenty-nine counties, b u t a b o u t two-thirds of
them relate t o Dublin, Meath and Kildare. They are noticed in Rept. of the council
of trustees of the National Library, 1908-9, p. 15.
35
Dub. Soc. Proc. 15 (1779), p . 129. J . T . G i l b e r t , History of Dublin, V o l . 3, 1 8 6 1 ,
p . 369.
36
For an illustrated description of Richard Frizell's work see Aalen and Hunter,
art. cit. pp. 88, 90.
37
Tara estate maps, 1810-15, kindly lent by Mr. G. Briscoe.
38
Ordnance Survey office, Dublin. File 8188, 7 December 1889.
292