Mapping memory: Britain's Second Land Utilisation Survey

The sun is high over the farmland around Fochabers, Morayshire, in the summer of 1967. A teenager, home from the University of Aberdeen between semesters, unpacks her sandwiches at the side of a single-lane track, and spreads out her Ordnance Survey maps, handwritten notes pencilled in from corner to corner.

The land around her home village, and across the Moray Valley, is rich farmland, threaded through with brooks and burns, sheltered by the hills from the Atlantic wind. The River Spey, so fast-flowing it changes its course every year when it goes into spate, helps produce plentiful crops of barley, feeding the thriving whisky industry in the area, the world-renowned Speyside region. In 1967, tiny distilleries dot the landscape. On her Ordnance Survey map, cut into small pieces for easy transportation, Margaret has noted the names of every one.

A national project built by volunteers

Like thousands of other students, teachers and geographers across Scotland, from the Outer Hebrides to the Borders, she is part of a project called the Second Land Utilisation Survey, a project initiated by Professor Alice Coleman in Kings College London (KCL). In the 1930s, Coleman's colleague, the famed geographer Laurence Dudley Stamp, had conducted its predecessor, facilitated by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and the labour of a quarter of a million volunteers. The findings of the survey had been instrumental in reforming and optimising the country's land use policies, especially in wartime.

But Stamp had built his reputation in no small part by emphasising the need for constantly updated information, and it was on his authority that Coleman's project was approved by KCL, albeit with far fewer resources than her colleague a generation earlier.

Coleman's Second Land Utilisation Survey will, when all's said and done, take the best part of a decade. The work will be done on a shoestring, relying on the curiosity, commitment, and sturdy walking shoes of students, their teachers, boy scouts and girl guides, and local members of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS). Margaret, along with her cousin Katy Brown, and many of their classmates in Fochabers and Elgin, will be some of the last to submit their findings.

Unlike England and Wales, the Scottish participants in the project lack crucial financial support, and begin their work years later than their colleagues south of the border. By the survey's conclusion, information for sixty per cent of the land area of Great Britian will be gathered, and over a third of Scotland's thirty thousand square miles.

Margaret and Katy had become intimately familiar with the farms and forests and fields around their homes, and the crops, rivers and forests, as well as the most accessible paths through remote hinterlands. After their findings have been handed in to their schoolteachers, their summers exploring Moray soon fade. Margaret travels to Aberdeen to study Geography, then on to Glasgow. There, using skills honed in the fields around Fochabers, she earns a Diploma in Cartography, and starts a career in the school atlas department of Collins Publishers. Katy moves to Edinburgh, where she studies Social Sciences, and becomes a schoolteacher herself.

And, for half a century, that was the end of the story.

Finding their work again

Today, I arrive at the Library's Maps Reading Room, getting out of the steady, heavy rain saturating Edinburgh's city centre (a poor day for original cartography). I'm led to a brightly lit reading room with one wall covered in shelves of huge, leather-bound books in navy and maroon, titles engraved in gold ink. On the huge, charcoal-coloured table that occupies much of the floor-space, are dozens of A1-sized (about two feet by three), brightly coloured maps of the Valley of Moray, exactly as it was in August 1967.

Here is the cathedral city of Elgin, so detailed it shows the shape of every house. Here is a decommissioned airfield growing oats and barley, whose runways, Margaret tells me, had later been used to give driving lessons to teenagers. The maps even include the concrete blocks installed near Covesea Lighthouse on Lossie Beach, a project Katy's father worked on, protecting those same airfields from attack during the war.

What has brought me, Margaret and Katy to the reading rooms, is a short article written by Map Curator Chris Fleet, tucked right at the back of the Winter 2024 edition of 'The Geographer', the RSGS's periodical. Margaret, a long-time member of the society, instantly recognised the colour-coding of a map of Bathgate in 1968 the article had used. The map's creator had used the same designations for fields of grass, oats, and potatoes. And the town's extensive mining and quarrying operations, still clinging on in an age of closures and labour disputes, a moment in history captured forever by the work of volunteers just like Margaret. After consulting her cousin and the staff at the Library, Margaret arranged a visit. Hence today's reunion with the maps they had made sixty years ago, and which neither she nor Katy had laid eyes on since they handed them in to their Geography teachers.

What the mapmakers remember

As Margaret and Katy tell me about their time on the project, we explore the maps on the table. These are the finished pieces: precise, neat, and, using Professor Coleman's comprehensive colour-coding system, beautifully intuitive. Margaret taps a finger across different spots, quickly finding her high school; the forest by Christie's nursery where she birdwatched; and Lossie beach, where she remembers the rows of wooden shelters her family used when they went swimming in the firth. Katy finds her father's public works company, constructing water systems for distilleries like Baxter's and Johnnie Walker, and the dam above Forres, the Romach reservoir. It becomes clear that these maps represent something far more personal than a nationwide data collection survey, or even an old school project.

To me, they look like a phenomenal amount of work. "It must've been fun," Katy reassures me, "otherwise we wouldn't have done it! And it was interesting comparing it with other people who were out in the field, to see what they found out. We always went in pairs from the school, you'd bring your lunch with you, sometimes you'd go back to check your work with the farmer, make sure you'd got it right!"

"You had to really look at each field," Margaret recalls, pointing out each tiny, labelled square. "The map told you where the woodland was, where the rough ground was. Then we would identify which crops were being grown, were there animals in the fields, where were the golf courses, distilleries – it's amazing how many there were, in the hinterland."

When I ask what sense they had as teenagers about the historic significance of the survey, or Professor Coleman's philosophy, Margaret shakes her head. "Our Geography teacher, Mr Dawson, just came in, said 'Look, I've got a project, I want you to do it, summer term, out you go into the wilderness'. We'd thought that all of Scotland was doing it, but from what we could tell it was really just wherever the teachers were interested, covering the areas where they stayed, and Elgin and Fochabers had that."

Margaret explains that Chris Fleet's article had directed her to the Library website, where the survey had been uploaded, including a searchable map of Great Britain. Each sheet had been digitally scanned, and not only did they retain all the data Margaret and Katy had gathered sixty years ago, they bore one more vital piece of information: their names.

Today, under the softly buzzing lights of the reading room, Margaret points to the blue ink handwriting at the top of the sheet. "When you looked on the maps online, I could see my name. Then I looked at the Elgin map and saw Katy's name. And I let her know, and that's when we came to see them, because our names were on individual maps. It brought it all right back to us, because it proved that we did do it! We didn't have any other proof of which ones we'd done! The memory of it had faded away until that article came out."

The full collection of maps had been held centrally by Professor Coleman, with the intention of publishing them and their findings. The costs of doing so were prohibitive, however, and the vast majority went no further than Coleman's library. After her passing in 2023 at the age of 99, the maps were rediscovered, and returned to institutions around the country, finally made public in a way that simply hadn't been possible in the 1960s. Without the Library curators' care and attention, the maps might have remained lost to history, and volunteers like Margaret and Katy might never have known their work as students had been made a permanent feature in the national record, a small but vital note in Scottish history.

Work that lasts

Glasgow writer Helen Charman's book, 'Mother State', is a fascinating study into the vast amount of unpaid labour it takes to sustain a society, mostly performed by women. From a variety of angles, the book argues that this work "is rooted in something small, something daily, something repetitive". Like hiking through farmland with a map and a pencil on your summer holidays, society's most necessary work is rarely glamorous. The last word of Charman's introduction rings true: "We have to help each other with the difficult work of living that is yet to come." Like the striking miners in Bathgate, or the long-lost distillers in Morayshire, the first step in preserving someone's story is the hard, unsung labour of going out into the world, witnessing it, and recording it.

Though they had little sense of it at the time, Margaret and Katy were part of something much larger. A tapestry of knowledge-making that covered an entire country, within whose information lies the stories of millions of people. Stories that, without the dedication of an army of volunteers, might never have been noted at all.

"You wonder what there'd be if they did it again now," Margaret suggests, scanning the sheets, following miniature representations of the roads and coastlines of her childhood. Katy laughs. "I don't think my bit would've changed at all!"

As we tidy up the sheets, Katy shares with us a poem in Doric she remembered about one of her schoolteachers (which I agree to leave off the record). Margaret wonders what their work might mean for future researchers, historians, or even artists. "Perhaps if someone was writing a novel about that area, you could learn what parts were forested, how many distilleries there were, that sort of thing. It'd be a good way of learning the lay of the land."

Thanks to Margaret, Katy, and thousands of people like them, we all have the chance to find out.