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Timothy Pont was born about 1565, the son of a prominent
churchman. He attended St Andrews University,
graduating in 1583, and may have learnt cartography
from one of the professors there. After graduation
his father gave him a small annual sum which ensured
his financial independence and enabled him to
start on his project to map the country. There is some
uncertainty as to why he did this rather than
pursue a church career: one suggestion is that it was
at the instigation of James VI, another is that
the church authorities wanted a survey of their jurisdictions.
Whatever the reason he started his project, probably
soon after graduation. It involved travelling  to
all parts of the country where he faithfully recorded
towns, villages and fermtouns with their names,
noting their relation in the landscape
to each other and in relation to the rivers
and hills. He was often the object of
suspicion and was frequently robbed, sometimes even
losing the results of a survey. Nevertheless he
persevered and the result was a large number
of manuscript maps which gave a highly detailed
picture of the geography of Scotland.
It is not certain when he completed the survey but
it is likely to have been in the late 1590’s. He seems
for a while to have attempted to publish the maps but
as Robert Gordon says, "he was defeated by the
avarice of printers and booksellers, and could not bring
it to a conclusion." There may have been limited
success however as a map of Lothian and Linlithgow appeared
in the Mercator-Hondius Atlas of 1630 and may have
been engraved between 1603 and 1612 by Jocodus Hondius
the Elder.
Pont, by now Minister of Dunnet in Caithness, died
in 1613 or 1614, leaving his papers to his heirs. They
seem to have neglected them but they were bought by Sir
James Balfour of Denmilne, an antiquarian and historian.
Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit heard about the maps and
knowing that Joan Blaeu of Amsterdam was looking
for maps of Scotland for his planned Atlas, informed him
of the Pont manuscripts. As a result the
maps were sent to Blaeu who engraved some of them but
returned others with a request for more detailed
information. These were worked on by Robert Gordon of
Straloch who sent revised drafts back that incorporated
some of his own work. The Blaeu Atlas was published
in 1654, immediately making Scotland one of the best mapped
countries in the world. As 35 of the regional maps
are credited to Pont we can assume they depicted
the country at the time he surveyed it, i.e. pre-1600
rather than when the Atlas was published. This
means that the river crossings and placenames must date
from this time. The roads shown on several of the
sheets probably date from the mid-1600’s and were probably
gathered in preparing for the atlas as were some
of the lists of distances. However, some of these are
ascribed to Pont so that it is likely that the
implied routes existed in his day. When all these sources
of evidence are taken together they give us a surprisingly
good picture of the network of routes existing at that
time.
Full details of Timothy Pont and the maps can be found
at the National
Library of Scotland. See also Jeffrey Stone’s
Illustrated Maps of Scotland from Blaeu’s Atlas Novus
of the 17th Century, Studio Editions, London, 1991
as well as the edition of the Atlas published by Birlinn.
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