CARTOGRAPHERS in ancient days had no problems when it came to the location of Scotland’s islands and their names, as they just made them up.

That’s just one of the fascinating insights into the history of Scotland’s near 800 offshore islands contained in a new book by some of the country’s leading map experts and published by leading Scottish publishers Birlinn.

Scotland: Mapping the Islands is the first book to take the maps of Scotland’s islands as its central focus and which uses some of the most stunning and historically significant maps from the National Library of Scotland’s map collection, the tenth largest in the world.

Early maps from the 16th century such as that by the Italian cartographer Callapoda, whose real name was Giorgio Sideri, show fictitious islands and strange names.

“It is only in the last 400 years that map makers became concerned about accuracy,” said co-author Christopher Fleet, curator of the National Library’s maps.

“Some of the earliest map makers do seem as if they were playing some kind of fantasy game when it came to Scotland’s islands.”

It was a cleric who was a native of Fife who taught cartographers the truth about Scotland's geography.

Fleet told The National that the key figure in early accurate map-making was Timothy Pont, son of a prominent Presbyterian cleric and a graduate of St Andrews University who started compiling maps of Scotland in 1580 before later becoming a Church of Scotland minister.

Fleet said: “He was the first to make maps of Scotland that were relatively accurate and his detailed maps included many islands but he left out a lot, too.

“He mapped towns and rural areas and in many ways his maps were very influential. Indeed, the first atlas of Scotland was based on his maps.”

The new book explores the many dimensions of island life and shows how it has been realised and represented through the art, artifice and authority of maps.

Scotland: Mapping the Islands is a collaborative work by the three authors of the award-winning Scotland: Mapping the Nation (2011), namely Fleet, the Geographer Royal for Scotland, Professor Charles Withers, and Margaret Wilkes, Convener of the Collections Committee of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and one of its Board of Directors.

Arranged thematically, the book covers topics such as population, place-names, defence, improvement, the exploitation of natural resources, navigation, and leisure and tourism. It presents the rich and diverse story of Scottish islands in a unique and imaginative way, from the earliest maps to the most up-to-date techniques of digital mapping.

Prof Withers said: “Our concern is with the mapping behind the maps – that is, with the technical, political, institutional and artistic processes by which Scotland’s islands have been variously made real in map form.

“Scotland’s islands have been powerfully shaped – on paper and in the imagination – by being represented on maps. We hope that our book will give Scottish islands the attention they deserve, and properly recognise their role in shaping the geography, history, and present state of Scotland itself.”

Fleet, who will give a talk on the book at next week’s Biggar Festival, added: “This book showcases some 160 maps as full colour plates, each selected for the particular stories and insights they give into Scotland’s islands over time.

“By looking at who made these maps, why they made them, and who they made them for, we hope to show how maps both reflect and drive important processes in the history and current affairs of Scotland’s islands.”