Essay No. 4
Drawing the Hill
Before the computers, contours were cut by hand into coated film with a jewelled point. I learned on a hill I had never seen, and last summer I finally went to stand on it.
The first hill I ever drew was in the Cairngorms, and I drew it for about four months, most days, from a desk in Southampton with a strip light humming over it and a view of the car park.
This was 1991, and the Survey was in the long, strange middle of turning from ink into numbers. Some of the work was already on screens. But trainees still learned the old way, on the principle that you should understand a line before you are allowed to let a machine draw one, and the old way was scribing.
You were given a sheet of clear polyester film with a soft, opaque coating on it, a sort of dried brownish varnish. Under it, on a light table, you laid the compilation, the surveyed points and the rough lines you were to follow. And then you took the scriber, a little three-legged stand with a point in the middle of it, sapphire for the fine work, and you cut through the coating along the line. Not drew. Cut. You were taking away the dark to let the light through, so that what you made was a negative: a sheet of brown with hairlines of clear in it, which would later be used to make a printing plate.1If you made a mistake you painted over it with an opaque fluid and cut it again. Everybody’s first sheets were mottled with little dark scabs where they had done this. Mine were a disgrace.
The scriber held the point exactly upright and exactly at one depth, so the line came out at exactly one width. Your job was only to steer. It sounds easy, and it is the hardest thing I have ever done with my hands.
A contour line is a strange thing to spend four months with. It joins all the points on the ground that are at the same height. That’s the definition, and it is perfectly clear, and it is also slightly mad, because there is no such line. Nothing on the hill marks it. You could walk along the 400-metre contour of a mountain for a whole afternoon and never see a sign of it: not a change in the grass, not a path, not anything.
The way I came to think of it, bent over that light table, was as a tideline. If the sea rose until it was four hundred metres deep, this is where it would stop. It would lap at the hill exactly here, along this impossible, wriggling edge, in and out of every gully, round every spur, and the line I was cutting was the mark it would leave. Each contour is a flood. A map of a hill is a hundred floods drawn on top of each other, ten metres apart.
There are rules. A contour never crosses another one, because no point can be two heights at once. A contour never stops, except at the edge of the sheet, because the flood has to go all the way round. Close together means steep; far apart means gentle. Every fifth line is heavier, the index contour, and carries its height written into a little break in it, the figures always facing uphill, so that you can tell at a glance which way the ground is going.2The figures face uphill so that the tops of the numbers point to the top of the hill. I have never found out who decided this, and I have loved them for it for thirty-five years.
My hill was a rounded thing, steep on one side and long and gentle on the other, with a cairn on top and a forest round its feet and a loch at the bottom. I cut it, and was told it was wrong, and cut it again. I learned that my hand pulled slightly to the left on a long curve, and that I held my breath on tight bends, and that you cannot scribe a good line if you have had an argument that morning. I learned the shape of it so well that I could have drawn it with my eyes shut, and I think sometimes I did, in bed.
I had never seen it. It was a shape, a set of floods, a name in Gaelic that I could not pronounce. Meall a’ Bhuachaille: the hill of the herdsman. Eight hundred and ten metres.
Last August I went to stand on it.
I took the sleeper as far as Aviemore and a bus to the end of the road by the loch, and walked up through the pines in a thin rain that couldn’t decide what it was doing. I hadn’t told anybody why I was going, except the man in the next bunk on the train, who asked, and who looked at me afterwards with great kindness, as at someone who has explained that they are travelling six hundred miles to visit a drawing.
It was nothing like the map, of course. The map never is. There was heather, and loose stones, and a family from Leeds with a dog in a little coat, and a wind on the top that took my breath. The forest was further down than I had thought it would be. The loch was a different colour from any blue I had imagined in that car park in 1991: a dull, pewtery, moving colour, with the cloud on it.
And yet. Going up, on the steep side, I found I was counting. Not deliberately. Somewhere in my legs, I knew where the lines were. Here the ground tightened and I thought: they’re bunching up, and they were, I could feel it, the floods packing close. Here it eased, and they spread apart, and I could breathe again. Somewhere near the top, on the long gentle shoulder, I knew without looking that I had crossed an index line, the heavy one, with its little figure facing uphill, and I laughed out loud, and the dog in the coat barked at me.
I sat by the cairn for a while in the wind and ate a cheese sandwich. I thought about how much of my life had been spent drawing places I would never go, on behalf of people who would; and how the drawing had gone into me so far that it was waiting for me here, at eight hundred and ten metres, thirty-five years later, like a thing I had left in a coat pocket.
People sometimes say that a map is not the territory, and they say it as if it is a criticism of maps. It is true. The line is not on the hill. But I’m no longer sure the line is only on the paper, either. I think it is in the people who have learned to read it, the way music is in the people who have learned to hear it. You walk up a hill you have only ever drawn, and the floods rise round you, one by one, ten metres at a time, and you know exactly where you are.