The Gough Map: The Earliest Road Map of Great Britain? (Treasures from the Bodleian Library, Oxford) [Hardcover]

Three years ago, I purchased a wonderful replica of the Gough Map of Great Britain from the Bodleian Library shop. It is incredibly detailed and came with a brochure that described many of its features. The Bodleian has been digitizing the original map, and this book shows a projection of a modern map of Great Britain over the the Gough Map. It also features a fold out print of the map, significantly better than the replica I purchased, and many detailed images. I'm sorry that Amazon doesn't permit inserting links to outside resources, but you will find the Queen's or Bodleian Map Room website acts as a very useful footnote to this book. Nick Millea, the author writes that research on the Gough Map will continue and will be made public there.

Millea is map librarian at Oxford University's Bodleian Library. In a recent interview he said: "The Gough Map is the first modern map of Britain and the oldest surviving map which shows the coastline in recognizable form. All previous maps gave a theological interpretation, showing how Britain fitted into the Christian world. The Hereford Mappa Mundi from approximately the same time has Jerusalem as the center of the world. Geography just wasn't important."

The Gough Map was drawn in pen, ink and colored washes on two skins of vellum. It measures almost four feet long by two feet wide. A collector named Gough bought it in 1774 for half a crown and donated it to the Bodleian Library in 1809. The identity of the mapmaker or mapmakers is unknown; clues to its date come from place names that have changed over time, and from studies of the hand used to inscribe those names onto the map.

There is no record of any similar medieval map at such scale or accuracy. The Gough Map shows countless hills, mountains, lakes, New Forest, Sherwood Forest, and even Hadrian's Wall (labelled "murus pictorum", the Picts' Wall). More than 600 settlements, almost 200 rivers, and almost 3,000 miles of red lines are shown. London and York are in gold and other places like Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Lincoln, Norwich, Oxford, Salisbury and Winchester are lavishly illustrated.

Although the map is undated, certain features provide clues to its original date. The construction of Coventry's town walls is instructive - work was begun in 1355 and a wall does appear. The settlement of Sheppey became Queenborough in 1366, but is still marked as 'Shephey', which suggests an 11-year dating window. The style of the handwritten place names also suggests the mid- to late fourteenth century.

The map is the first to depict the coastline of Great Britain in a recognizable form. Scotland is not recognizable; apparently the mapmakers had little knowledge of that area. The Clyde and Forth and Edinburgh are recognizable, but the rest of Scotland doesn't match a modern mapping. Millea believes the Gough Map was created at a time when Scotland was a foreign country and little was known about it so the mapmakers simply guessed.

Whatever their knowledge of Scotland, the mapmakers' knowledge of the rest of the island was extraordinary. One wonders about many aspects of this map, not least how it was put together. Did they draw the outline of the coast and then fill in the details? Or did they start with a particular area and then work out? How could the map be so accurate given the technical resources then available?

Millea indicates that the map was created in a single hand, but clearly one person couldn't have done all the necessary research, even if it was based on an earlier map as Millea suggests. I would love to know more about the dynamics of the mapmaker team, but perhaps that human element is now lost.

I plan to consult this wonderful book from time to time for pleasure, and visit the websites to learn about new information as it is discovered. Nick Millea writes there is much yet to learn about this wonderful map.

Robert C. Ross