Solving the mystery of Quebec. Mark Newman, National Trust Archaeologist

Investigating the Archives
7 June 2011

What a great afternoon, thanks to the West Yorkshire Archives Office at Sheepscar in Leeds. That’s where most of the Studley Royal estate records were deposited by the Vyner family in the late 1950s – those that survived the huge fire at Studley Hall in 1946, anyway. The Archives Service are being really helpful and supportive, including allowing us to reproduce images free of charge.

My mission was to take detailed photographs of the three hand-drawn estate maps that the archives hold. The earliest is the 1831 estate map; it is one of the great problems with understanding Studley that this is the earliest map of the garden that exists, drawn at least 150 years after the gardens began. There probably were earlier ones, but those were used until they fell to bits. When are historic maps like buses? When you wait for one to arrive for ages and it’s rapidly followed by another – the next plan dates from just seven years later in 1838, drawn when the government was taking over the rights to medieval Tithes. Finally there’s another estate map drawn in around 1875, providing a link between the first two published Ordnance survey maps of 1852 and 1892.

All of the maps depict Quebec slightly differently. One of our first tasks is going to be to compare the various different depictions and overlay them on the modern OS base. The changes might be the result of mediocre surveying or really represent changes to the feature (following flood damage for example) over time. That’s one of the questions we should be able to answer when we dig in September.

Odd though it seems, hitherto we’ve only had very limited copies of these early maps. We’ve made do with a single black and white photograph of each, taken in 1986. It seems incredible that, although I’ve been working at Studley for almost 23 years, I’ve never seen the things in the flesh before.

They’re perfectly wonderful, covering much more of the surrounding estate than I’d realised before. It’s amazing to use objects actually handled by the people whose history we now work so hard to recover, seeing the places where their fingers wore the sheets thin.
It’s also a revelation that the maps are coloured. This conceals a lot of detail that just disappeared into the black and white photographs. It was particularly exciting to find a whole new depth of information on the paths in the Chinese Garden (and the areas beyond along the Seven Bridges Valley). These have long since vanished on the ground. There’s enough new information to justify a further piece of work clarifying how this little known end of the gardens once operated.

So, we now have the photography we’ll need of the Quebec area, and much else too besides. They really are the treasure maps I thought they would be – rich reward for the aching arms that I’ve got from over three hours of carefully leaning out over the huge, fragile, sheets to take photographs without leaning on them.