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The Honourable Robert Edward Clifford was serving as a commissioned officer in Louis XVI's army in France when the French Revolution began. As a devout Catholic he found it impossible to remain in the army and serve the Revolution. He returned to England where his knowledge and experience gained at first-hand of French military science and cartography were put to good use by leading British army and naval com- manders as the planned Napoleonic assault on Britain was being developed. At this time it was the French who had ascended to the apex of Europe's military culture. Moreover, it was they who had made the greatest strides in the application of cartogra- phy to the logistics of an army in movement and who had assumed the mantle of European leadership in the realm of scientific map-making. In contrast, the procrastina- tion of the British in implementing a national survey, so admirably explored in Professor E. G. R. Taylor's researches, led to a lack of suitable maps at this vital moment in our history. Subsequently, with the threat of invasion diminishing after 1805, the prolific map-publishing firm ofJohn Cary was to benefit most from Robert Edward Clifford's cartographic skills as it endeavoured to keep abreast of the frequent changes in national boundaries and to illustrate the cartographies of victory and defeat.

On the whole global surface of land and sea it falls to the lot of some few places to emerge through time to be of immense importance. Lizard Point is just one such place. Who were the first mariners to realize that it was the most southerly point of the English mainland or to use it for landfall and for caping, we shall probably never know. What is clear, however, is that, by the time Claudius Ptolemy was compiling hisGuide to Geography, C. AD 160, it was sufficiently well known to the Roman world for the name by which it was then called,Damnonium or Ocrinum Promontorium, to be included, with its geographical coordinates, in his famous gazetteer. It is of academic interest only for us to query whether those coordinate values were right or wrong, whether they were a good approximation or not: what is important for us, with the benefit of very long hindsight, is to marvel at the sheer brilliance of the conception of a spherical coordinate system, and at the industry and far-sightedness of one or more men who set about compiling lists of known places with assigned coordinates. What, in so doing, they handed down to posterity is of inestimable value.

'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

As in the physical, so in the figurative sense, 'skeletons' are difficult to identify. Cartographic skeletons, 95 in number, and divisible into four distinct groups, survive in the muniment room of the Clifford family at Ugbrooke Park, Devon. This article attempts to identify them and to place them into their historical and contemporary mapping contexts thus revealing Robert Edward Clifford as a military analyst and valued consultant to the map-publishing firm of John Carey.

A methodology for assessing the planimetric accuracy of old maps is suggested and the results of its application to a map of Devon prepared by Benjamin Donn in 1765 are shown. The technique suggests that in terms of map-making, Donn's Map of Devon was justifiably rated highly.

Old Burrow and Martinhoe are situated on the rocky North Devon coast, 1100 and 800 ft. high respectively above the seas of the Bristol Channel (PL. LIIa) , on either side of the small seaside town of Lynmouth. Both sites command an extensive view of the South Wales coast, 17 to 20 miles away (FIG. 4), but owing to an intervening hill, the Foreland, they are not intervisible. Inland the outlook is limited to the northern slopes of Exmoor, which rises to 1600 ft. some 6 to 7 miles away. The coastal tract in which they are situated was sparsely inhabited by friendly Iron Age peoples, the Dumnonii, living in small hillforts and isolated from the main body of the tribe in South Devon and Cornwall.The Roman earthworks are practically identical (FIGS. I and 3); they consist of an inner rectilinear enclosure, 90 ft. square defended by a rampart and two ditches, set within a rounded outer enclosure, some 300 ft. in diameter and with a single rampart and ditch. At Martinhoe the outer enclosure ends on the cliffs, which form its northern side.The entrance to the inner fartlet in both cases is on the seaward side; to the outer on the opposite landward side, so that all comers would be obliged to make a half-circuit between the two lines of defences under fire. In effect the device resembles that at the Claudian fort at Hod Hill in Dorset, where the defences were also designed to trap attackers within the range of missiles—spears or ballista bolts.

This paper describes a survey carried out by Joel Gascoyne in an area outside his usual sphere of operations. The sequence of events leading up to Gascoyne's appointment as surveyor are briefly discussed, followed by a description of the survey methods employed and an assessment of their accurcy.

This paper discusses the evidence for the existence of John Norden's manuscript maps of Cornwall and describes the investigations leading to their discovery.

The last occasion on which a substantial contribution to the study of John Norden appeared in the Geographical Journ was in 1950 when Edward Lynam, in his paper 'English maps and map-makers of the sixteenth century', devoted several pages to this early cartographer. Lynam, who there described Norden as 'one of the greatest of early English map-makers, but a man born twenty years too late', joined a very small group of Norden's admirers, among the earliest of whom was Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755). It was he who, about 1726, submitted to the printer this encomium on Norden: 'It has been a just matter of complaint in all ages that those who have most eminently distinguished themselves in behalf of Mankind, have generally met with unworthy treatment: having been forced to an unequal combat with neglect and poverty while living; and even when the envy against their merit has ceased, the memorial of their virtue has been buried in the same grave . . . our diligent and ingenious Author himself with whose most finished performance, viz. the Survey of Cornwall, we now present the world had a strong infusion of these ingredients dispensed to him; since our country has preserved very slender remembrances of his distinction.' These words were written for and were included in the Speculi Britanniae Parsy A Topographical and Historical Description of Cornwall printed in 1728 by William Pearson for the bookseller Christopher Bateman. This is, as far as the setting of the print allows, a page for page copy of John Norden's manuscript in his own handwriting and it is still preserved in the Harleian Collection (Harl. MS. 6252) in the British Museum. The presence of several coloured views in Norden's own hand interlined in the text and the absence of his manuscript maps?the engraved maps of the printed copy being inserted instead?has presented for many years an enigma; one deepened by Edward Lynam's statement in the above-mentioned paper, claiming that when the printed version was produced in 1728 the manuscript maps 'were missing, so Bateman substituted excellent contemporary maps'. Although there is evidence to suggest that John Norden did include maps of Corn? wall in the manuscript presented to King James I, the mystery of their disappearance has, until recently, remained unsolved. The subsequent binding into Harl. MS. 6252 of the engraved maps, in place of the manuscript maps, is even more cartographically mysterious, particularly as Norden's manuscript map references, of which there are many hundreds, are for the most part at variance with those of the engraved maps. To have concocted the 1728 maps from the manuscript map references alone, or even from 'contemporary' maps, would have been a labour of immense magnitude; but even if it were feasible then agreement between manuscript references and engraved map would follow as the one would be derived directly from the other. Clearly, therefore, some maps must have existed between the manuscript and the making of the engraved maps, and a search among any papers surviving from the personalities concerned with the printing in 1728 seemed to be called for. This search?which was both long and involved?led backwards and forwards in time, and the names of others who had handled Norden's manuscript and its copies were uncovered until, on 8 July 1970, the final resting place of a copy of Norden's Speculum Britanniae was found among