ABSTRACT
Christopher Saxton's wall maps and his atlas of the counties of England and Wales had introduced a new level of cartographic precision to the late sixteenth century, and by the 1650s these new technologies, and the rising expectations of cartographic accuracy and precision which they embodied, had become all but ingrained in the wider culture. Though a few properties had been surveyed in the first half of the century following the dissolution of the monasteries, it was only with the publication of Saxton's county atlas that the use of scale maps began to proliferate. The portrait of Bilbrough begins by emphasizing the mathematical precision of the hill, conferring on it the associated connotations of order and an implicitly mapped precision. As in Bilbrough and Bermudas, the cartographic discourse that the poet implicitly introduces begins to deconstruct the very sense of precision and stability it at first maintains.
