Andrew Davies on the history of mountain cartography
mapping the mountains Andrew Davies
Mountain maps rank amongst the most beautiful examples of cartography. That beauty becomes even starker when one realises the lengths to which early cartographers went to produce them. These unsung surveyors who hauled heavy equipment in all kinds of weathers to well-nigh inaccessible peaks to take measurements became explorers in their own right, perhaps the first true mountaineers. Mapping the Mountains is a new book which traces the development of this specialised discipline of cartography from Roman times to the present day.
The book asks the fundamental question: what makes a mountain map inherently different from any other kind of topographic map? All topographic maps, after all, are made by measuring spatial relationships on the ground and rendering them on a twodimensional surface. Perhaps self-evidently, the answer lies in
the fact that a third dimension must be introduced to represent the verticality of the landscape, thus presenting cartographers with two key obstacles. Firstly, how to measure vertical angles and distances in poorly navigable terrain, often where the field of vision is obstructed by intervening landforms. And secondly, how to translate this verticality onto a flat surface( i. e. the map) in a way and at a scale which is intelligible to the reader. With their unprecedented levels of accuracy and detail, the beauty of modern-day mountain maps is matched only by their technical brilliance. Somehow, they are able to make a vertiginous mass of mountains come away from the page in a trick of the eye. This near-perfection – can a map ever be perfect? – has not, of course, been achieved overnight, but over centuries of evolving cartographic skills. The carefully crafted lines, hatching, contours, colours and shading on a map to depict relief are techniques that have been applied and refined by generations of cartographers to produce this illusion, based on painstaking measurements of heights, distances and angles taken in the most inhospitable of environments.
Mountain cartography has developed largely in parallel to the step-ups made in mainstream cartography. One early development, for example, was the‘ rediscovery’ of Ptolemy’ s Geographia in the late Middle Ages, a time when overseas exploration by the major European powers was becoming de rigueur. Often called the father of geography, Claudius Ptolemy, probably of Greek origin, worked at the famous library in Alexandria in the 2nd century CE. Not only did he make a fairly accurate estimate of the size of the Earth, he also collated a gazetteer of coordinates for 8,000 locations in the Roman world by way of astronomical observation. By applying the principles of the Geographia, early Renaissance mapmakers were able to improve vastly on medieval maps of the world and the known continents.
The invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century enabled maps to be mass-produced and distributed widely. Because of its proximity to early centres of printing and publishing along the Rhine, most notably Basel, Switzerland became a front-runner in mapmaking. Under the sway of Ptolemy, early mapmakers such as Konrad Türst, Aegidius Tschudi, Sebastian Münster and Johann Stumpf started producing regional maps of the nascent Swiss confederacy, including depictions of mountainous cantons like Valais, Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden.
Nevertheless, cartographic interest in mountains, glaciers and uninhabitable regions remained relatively non-existent: there was simply no incentive for producing detailed maps of mountains. In these early maps, fancifully embellished in the style of the cartographer, mountains were emphatically present, but peripheral, subordinate to the lines of communication along major valleys and across the main Alpine passes which linked major settlements. Little attempt was made to represent mountains in a two-dimensional form, but rather as cones and molehills seen in perspective.
Mapping the Mountains
Andrew Davies on the history of mountain cartography
Planimetric maps, that is, those depicting elevated terrain from above in a‘ plan view’ and reducing mountains to a two-dimensional form began appearing in the 17th century. Again, this was an innovation devised in Switzerland most notably by Hans Conrad Gyger, a cartographer who was tasked by the military authorities with drawing a map of north-eastern part of the confederacy. The 1667 map he produced presented the landscape from a vertical viewpoint using natural colours and shaded relief. Ironically, the map failed to have any influence on contemporary mapmakers since it was hidden away as a military secret.
Around the same time, in 1668 King Louis XIV of France appointed the Italian astronomer, Giovanni Domenico Cassini as director of the royal observatory in Paris. He was part of a plan to put France at the forefront of modern science. This included producing an accurate map of the nation, for scientific, military, administrative and economic purposes, based on geodetic principles. Geodesy is the science of accurately measuring the size and understanding the geometry of the Earth and it was under the auspices of Cassini that France harnessed the two key tools to achieve this: astronomy, the observation of celestial objects to accurately pinpoint a location; and triangulation, measuring relationships between the lengths and angles of fixed points of a triangle. The French were the first to exploit these principles on a large scale for mapping purposes.
© Zentralbibliothek Zürich
Between 1730 and 1744, the territory of France was calibrated by a network of 800 triangles. Over later decades, the topographic details were filled in, involving the mapping of the country’ s mountains, rivers, towns and villages. It wasn’ t until the 1770s that maps of the French Alps
12 OUTDOOR FOCUS Autumn 2025