I spent my youth and twenties hiking the Canadian Rockies as much as I could, always with topo maps in hand. So a book like Mapping the Mountains by Andrew Davies (Uitgeverij Moving Mountains, 2026) holds considerable appeal: maps and mountains, maps of mountains, the process by which mountains were mapped—there’s nothing here for me to dislike.
This book is an outgrowth of a 2019 exhibition for the Dutch Mountain Film Festival. This has a couple of implications. For one, it means that the maps themselves are front and centre: the book is chockablock with reproductions. For another, it means that the book casts a fairly wide net, because this is a thing that exhibitions—of a certain size and focus, at least—tend to do. This means that Davies goes back a bit further past what you might expect as a starting point. Let me put it this way: the Tabula Peutingeriana makes an appearance. This is because how mountains have been mapped over time is part of the brief, which is to draw together a narrative of mountain mapping from fairly disparate and unconnected efforts. So we get to see how mountains used to be mapped in the 15th or 16th century, and the change from hill signs and oblique views to contour lines and relief shading.
Broadly speaking, Mapping the Mountains covers three things: cartographic techniques when it comes to depicting mountains, surveying methods, and exploration and discovery. Davies lays down the groundwork, with opening sections explaining astronomy, triangulation, photogrammetry and relief mapping before getting into the meat of things, which, coincides with the start of national surveys like the Cassini. Eventually, though, we come to the meat of the matter, and what a casual reader might expect: expeditions to map unknown mountain ranges and peaks.
It’s mostly western in focus, because a lot of this was a colonial—or at least imperial, or at the very least international—enterprise, with Italians surveying British colonial territory, Germans exploring unknown parts of what was then the Soviet Union, and British-trained spies penetrating deep into the forbidden Tibetan plateaus. The focus is basically Western as a result, but the coverage is global: the Alps, the Andes, the Pamirs, the Rockies, the Rwenzoris. And, of course, the Himalayas—the book ends on a literal high note, with the fairly recent story of Bradford Washburn and the map of Everest published by National Geographic in 1988.
Had Davies attempted a history of any one of these mapping endeavours he’d have had more than enough for a book. There are some cracking stories about the people doing the surveying, some of which are absolutely wild. I enjoyed the time I spent with this book.
I received an electronic review copy from the author.
Mapping the Mountains
by Andrew Davies
Uitgeverij Moving Mountains, 27 Mar 2026, £40
ISBN 978-90-832223-5-6
Amazon (Canada, UK)