Several surveys of Edinburgh's environs were sold fromthe bookshop, but the extent of the environs varied.In the 1770s and 1780s Elliot sold an ‘Environs ofEdinburgh’ map encompassing just a fifteen-mileradius, as well as ‘Ainslies Map 50 miles RoundEdinburgh’. But by 1812 John Ainslie had published asurvey of ‘The environs of Edinburgh’ that alsofunctioned as ‘a complete map of the South Eastdistrict of Scotland’ stretching to the border withEngland some eighty miles south. This expansion ofEdinburgh's environs was also the effect of itssurveying in the period: extending the city'sinfluence, and consolidating the connections betweenthe urban centre and its rural peripheries.

Ainslie and other Edinburgh-based land surveyors playeda vital role in the transformation of the southernScottish countryside. They planned new ruralvillages, as well as roads and bridges whichexpedited trade and correspondence between the cityand its surroundings. Their surveys facilitated thelevelling, draining, dividing and enclosing ofagricultural land. Ainslie's Gentleman and Farmer's Pocket Companion andAssistant (1802) featured instructionsand information to aid this process, including a‘Table for knowing what number of thorns to purchasefor inclosing ground’. In Ainslie's home county ofRoxburghshire in the Scottish borders, common landswere almost entirely thorn-enclosed by the start ofthe nineteenth century. These ‘commonties’ had beenused by rural communities for public events, forforaging fuel, food, medicinal plants and buildingmaterials, and as shared grazing and arable land,but landlords denigrated them as barren wastelandsand surveyors helped to parcel them off to privatelandowners. The loss of common land-access rightsand the reorganisation of the rural economy hadimplications for Scotland's cities. Tenant farmersand agricultural labourers from Scotland's southerncounties migrated to industrial centres such asGlasgow and the expanding capital. Edinburgh'spopulation doubled in the first three decades of thenineteenth century. Agricultural production wasgeared towards meeting the growing urbanpopulation's demands and the regional landscapedominated by large, enclosed farms was barelyrecognisable from the rigs and open commons of acentury before. Methods of mapping and surveyingplayed a key role in this dramatictransformation.