Free The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester Page B

later for the Somerset Coal Canal Company, for the next eight years—eight years during which he would make the discovery, come to the realization, announce the deduction—and begin the hard grind—that would earn him his place in posterity.

5
A Light in the Underworld
    Hildoceras bifrons
    T he village of High Littleton is a gritty, windy, hilly, and generally unlovely place, almost as far removed from the traditional imagery of Somerset—no cider apples, no jolly farmers, no thatch or maypole or cricket on the green—as if it were near Nottingham or on the country fringes of industrial Lancashire.
    Much the same might be said of the entire swath of countryside that lies ten miles to the south and southwest of Bath. It is pinioned between some of the loveliest and most measured architecture in all of southern England. Wells Cathedral, with its statues and gargoyles, is the spiritual and aesthetic mooring point to the west. The ordered, bewigged, and precious life, the powdered and pomaded air of England’s once-second city, Regency Bath, wafts in from the east. But between lies an area that still today looks curiously out of place, architecturally, atmospherically, socially, commercially: It has smaller houses, meaner shops, grubbier streets, a spoiled and ragged landscape.
    All is a direct consequence of geology. These fifty squaremiles or so of Somerset, bounded by the red-brick villages of Clutton in the west and Combe Hay in the east, Priston in the north and Kilmersdon in the south, lie on top of a score of complex, broken, twisted, and contorted seams of coal, which until as late as the 1970s were worked by as independent and militant a band of English mining men as might ever have stepped out from beneath the winding gears of the coalfields of Durham or Lanark. Maybe their militancy had arisen because of the unusual proximity, in these parts, of their class enemies—all around them the great limestone houses and mannered city terraces were occupied by soft-handed gentleman farmers and sportsmen, philosophers and squires, artists and divines. There was no other local industry to provide brotherly support: In the fifty square miles of country that unrolled itself around where the twenty-two-year-old William Smith came to live and work, the laboring classes were coal miners, to a man.
    The mines were owned privately, usually by whoever owned the land under which the coal was first found. Of the Lady Jones who first employed William Smith to landscape the estate around her house in Stowey we know very little; but she and her late husband, Sir William Jones of Ramsbury, certainly owned a great deal of land other than the immediate neighborhood of her house, which included both a large number of the neighboring coal mines and a collection of farmhouses. It was into one of these, Rugborne, which stood on the eastern outskirts of High Littleton, that she allowed her new young employee to move.
    Smith had good reason to remember this house vividly. It was, he wrote, a large old manor house, three-storied, solid, and foursquare, sheltered by lime trees, and with a walled courtyard in front, and steps leading up to handsome gates and walls (now gone) that were thick enough to have a series of rounded niches in which Smith liked to sit and study his books. The house had once belonged to a Major Britton, who, the locals said, had ruined himself financially by working the coal seams that ranbeneath the house. But when Smith moved in it was occupied by a tenant farmer, Cornelius Harris, who gave him board and lodgings for half a guinea * a week, and took in his horse for an extra ten shillings a month.
    He remembered the house not so much for its architecture or its comfort or the eminently reasonable price of the accommodations, however. He remembered it because of the work that he was to engage in, first in a mine less than a mile away to the north, and later in the canal that he was to help build a little farther afield. It