How roads in England and Wales were mapped

As well as county maps you can also collect early road maps. All the county maps of the British Isles up until the reign of Charles II did not show any roads. But in 1675 John Ogilby published his Britannia which was an atlas in which the roads of England and Wales were mapped for the first time. None of Scotland. This must have been a most time consuming and exhausting survey. But it meant that after this period county map started to include roads. Britannia was a heavy folio sized volume. Very difficult to carry around with you. But after 1700 there started to be published a number of smaller atlases with road maps based on Ogilby's survey. Much more convenient for the traveller. A well known volume is Britannia Depicta by John Owen and Emanuel Bowen first published i 1720. It must have been just what the traveller needed with individual pages illustrating each English and Welsh county. These maps also provided copious infirmation wuth panels of neatly engraved notes. Along with the county maps were a large number of double sided road maps. Again these used the strip format used by Ogilby. In fact the book title page boasts that it is Ogilby Improved. Thomas Gardner also produced a small sized version of Ogilby's Britannia in 1719 named Pocket Guide to The English Traveller. You will not find the maps from this atlas so easily as those from Britannia Depicta which went into quite a number of editions up until about 1750.

Some maps are rarer and therefore more difficult for the collector to find today. It can be that maps or atlases that did not sell so well at the time all those years ago. In some cases it might not have been the popularity of the volumes but the circumstances that the atlases were offered. One reason could be that the cartograoher passed away and in some cases no one took over their business and copper plates. Or perhaps the cartographer or publisher fell upon hard times and the finance to carry on was not there. Thinking about such circumstances will only add to the pleaseure of collecing maps.