Caleb George Cash
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Caleb George Cash (1857–1916), honorary fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (FRSGS), was a geographer, passionate mountaineer, and music and geography teacher, known for his work on preserving the maps of medieval Scotland made by Timothy Pont (c.1560–c.1627), which formed the basis for the Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, and for organizing and publishing a bibliography compiled by Arthur Mitchell throughout Mitchell's life. Born in Birmingham, England, educated in London, and having worked in the North of England for a while, in his 30s he settled in Scotland and pioneered climbing in the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the eastern part of the Scottish Highlands.
Biography
Cash was born in poverty, in a working class family living in
In 1891, he started walking through the hills and climbing the mountains of the Cairngorms (which wasn't to be visited by the
His wife Alice accompanied him on a rare few of his climbs. He makes no mention of her doing so after 1894, although she accompanied him on a walk to view an eagle's nest in 1903 and cycling up
He was interested in the ecology of the land as well, and in 1907 published (privately) an account of the local history of the
Cash died in August 1917 after a short period of illness.[5][7] The Edinburgh Academy Chronicle had reported only that summer that he would not be working that term "owing to ill health" and that "we hope a term's rest will enable him to return with renewed vigour in October".[7]
Publications and research
Cash edited books on geography for young readers, including Cook's Voyages and The Story of the North-West Passage. His last book, A Contribution to the Bibliography of Scottish Topography, was published by the Scottish Historical Society in 1917, just months before he died, after he had spent fifteen years researching and writing the matter.[2] He also had an interest in archeology (including menhirs, cairns, and hill forts; he documented these and published on them in, for instance, the journal of the Cairngorm's Club. In 1908 he became a Corresponding Member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.[2]
He is best remembered for his study of the work of
He became friends with cartographer Sir Arthur Mitchell in 1901, and assisted Mitchell while he was working on publishing the Macfarlane's Geographical Collections; Mitchell was also his correspondent while Cash worked on what became A Contribution to the Bibliography of Scottish Topography, which incorporated the large collection of notes Mitchell left behind after he died in 1909.[9] Mitchell had simply jotted down notes on scraps of paper torn from unused parts of letters over the years and stored them in what Cash described as a "chaotic multitude" of cardboard boxes.[10] It took Cash a year and a half just to convert Mitchell's notes into a standardized format, and the work of compiling A Contribution occupied very nearly the rest of Cash's life, the next twelve years.[11] His largest work, it eventually ran to some 700 pages in two volumes, the first published in March 1917, and the second in May 1917.[12]
As mentioned in the preface to A Contribution Cash was helped by his brother Albert, someone whom he rarely mentioned in his writings, with obtaining maps from the British Museum in London.[10] Cash himself simply referred to the work as the List and MacInnes notes that Cash's earliest (the "Mountains Visible from Arthur's Seat") and last works were both lists.[7] Cash gave a signed copy of it to the library of the RSGS in June 1917, and as of the 21st century the National Library of Scotland has two copies, one on a reference shelf and one in a reading room, the latter of which, librarians there told MacInnes, they use all of the time in order to answer questions from the general public.[7]
Only 400 copies of A Contribution were printed, and when MacInnes bought a copy from an online bookseller he found that the leaves had not yet been separated, indicating that it had not been read in the century since its publication.[7]
Cash's papers appear not to have survived, but five copies of the
MacInnes's biography of Cash, shortlisted for the Saltire Society's First Book of the Year award in 2013, is part autobiography, part biography of Cash, and part history of the exploration of Scottish hills by climbers, complete with diagrams and illustrations of climbing routes and the like.[13][14]
Selected publications
Books
- Mitchell, Arthur; Cash, Caleb George (1917). A Contribution to the Bibliography of Scottish Topography. Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society. (Volume 1 at the Internet Archive; Volume 2 at the Internet Archive)
Articles
- Cash, Caleb George (1901). "The First Topographical Survey of Scotland". .
- Cash, Caleb George (February 1904). "How to make a panorama: with a reduction of that from Aviemore station". The Geographical Teacher. 2 (4). Geographical Association: 174–175. JSTOR 40556230.
- Cash, Caleb George (1902). "Nights and Days on the Caingorms". The Cairngorm Club Journal. 3. Cairngorm Club: 317–321.
References
- ^ MacInnes 2013, p. 93.
- ^ a b c d e f MacInnes, Kellan (September 2015). "Caleb George Cash". Retrieved 8 April 2022.
- ^ a b c MacInnes, Kellan (Autumn 2017). "Caleb George Cash FRSGS (1857-1917)". The Geographer: 30–31. Retrieved 8 April 2022.
- ^ MacInnes 2013, p. 13.
- ^ a b c d Stone, Jeffrey C. "Caleb G. Cash". Pont Maps of Scotland, ca. 1583-1614 - Biographies. Retrieved April 8, 2022.
- S2CID 131147590.
- ^ a b c d e MacInnes 2013, p. 278.
- ^ Stone, Jeffrey C. "The Kingdom of Scotland: Cartography in an Age of Confidence". In Woodward, David (ed.). Cartography in the European Renaissance (PDF). History of Cartography. Vol. 3. pp. 1684–92.
- ^ JSTOR 1150639.
- ^ a b MacInnes 2013, p. 277.
- ^ MacInnes 2013, pp. 277–278.
- ^ MacInnes 2013, pp. 257, 277.
- ^ Roddie, Alex (2012-12-20). "Caleb's List by Kellan MacInnes: book review". alexroddie.com.
- ^ Marsden 2021, p. 156.
Sources
- MacInnes, Kellan (2013). Caleb's List: Climbing the Scottish Mountains Visible from Arthur's Seat. Luath Press. ISBN 9781909912069.
- Marsden, Stevie (2021). Prizing Scottish Literature: A Cultural History of the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Anthem Studies in Book History. Anthem Press. ISBN 9781785274824.
Further reading
- Roddie, Alex (2017-11-24). "Climbing the Arthurs: interview with Kellan MacInnes, author of Caleb's List and The Making of Mickey Bell". The Great Outdoors. — includes a picture of Cash's "Mountains Visible from Arthur's Seat"