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As the name implies, the highlands are anything but flat, and so for armies laden with rations, muskets and ammunition, maps accurately showing which paths followed valleys, and which led up mountains or into lochs, could make the difference between victory and defeat. The historic, strategic, political and military value of effectively conveying territorial topographies – features natural and man-made – is fossilised in the name of the UK’s national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, which owes its existence to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and the long history of conflict and compromise shared between England and Scotland, when ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ gained the support of clansmen in the Scottish highlands in his bid to regain the British throne. Put another way: a Lexis surface is a way of visualising temporal change as if it were spatial change, of thinking about time as if it were space: of absolute time as if it were latitude, relative time as if it were longitude, and a third variable as if it were a height above sea level.Ī Lexis surface, like a spatial surface, is a surface, and for centuries the challenge of communicating the topography of spatial surfaces has been the challenge of producing meaningful maps of the world. a third variable, which co-varies with year and age, to the z axis.

age (or another measure of relative time) to the y axis,.year (or another measure of absolute time) to the x axis,.A Lexis surface is a Cartesian mapping of three attributes to three dimensions: