Appended to The Dabbler review of a history of the Ordnance Survey, a comment from Jonathon Green to serve as a warning to surveyors, geometers, and cartographers everywhere:

My favourite, if tragic cartographical story is retailed by Graham Robb in The Discovery of France (2007). It tells how a young geometer, employed in surveying a country that was still highly localised and almost wholly unmapped, arrived in the village of Les Estables, some forty miles (and about 400 years) away from Lyons. The villagers, simple peasant folk with their simple peasant ways and beliefs, assumed that this outsider, never seen in their village, must therefore be a herald of Satan. They hacked him to pieces.