The Gough Map - Britain's earliest roadmap
Here's a rare interesting article in one of the UK's crummiest daily newspapers (The Daily Mail) about "The Gough Map" - the oldest surviving map of Britain.
Cool, beautiful and unbelievably accurate, considering how extraordinarily old it is.
According to the Mail piece, the map clearly shows "more than 600 cities, towns and villages, almost 200 rivers, and a rudimentary road network marked with thin red lines and extending to some 3,000 miles. Along with countless hills, mountains, lakes, forests - New Forest and Sherwood - and even Hadrian's Wall..."
In classic Daily Mail fact-checking style, the main image of the full map in the article is incorrectly captioned - suggesting that it is the Hereford Mappa Mundi. But I can forgive them this slip, as the rest of the story is a great read.
As a bonus, there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia entry about this map yet - a nice little task for someone who feels like getting their cartographic vibe on.
[UPDATE: Fixed! Ah....crowdsourcing. The map now has a brand new Wikipedia stub, here, with a link to a fascinating interactive Gough Map viewer.]
Cool, beautiful and unbelievably accurate, considering how extraordinarily old it is.
According to the Mail piece, the map clearly shows "more than 600 cities, towns and villages, almost 200 rivers, and a rudimentary road network marked with thin red lines and extending to some 3,000 miles. Along with countless hills, mountains, lakes, forests - New Forest and Sherwood - and even Hadrian's Wall..."
In classic Daily Mail fact-checking style, the main image of the full map in the article is incorrectly captioned - suggesting that it is the Hereford Mappa Mundi. But I can forgive them this slip, as the rest of the story is a great read.
As a bonus, there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia entry about this map yet - a nice little task for someone who feels like getting their cartographic vibe on.
[UPDATE: Fixed! Ah....crowdsourcing. The map now has a brand new Wikipedia stub, here, with a link to a fascinating interactive Gough Map viewer.]
