Did you watch the first episode of Cyfrinachau’r Llyfrgell (Best Kept Secrets) on Tuesday on S4C? If so, you will have spotted items in our map collection taking a starring role during Tudur Owen’s journey around the library.
Tudur’s first map was John Speed’s Anglesey, one of the first standalone maps of the county. It was originally published in the Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain in 1611, an atlas of the whole of Britain. That’s only 40 years after the publication of the very first atlas as we would recognise it today, by Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp. John Speed’s work was the first large scale atlas produced in Britain, and there’s one map for each county in Wales in the second volume of the atlas.
Speed’s major contribution to the development of cartography was the inclusion of maps of important towns in each county. The Flintshire map includes plans of Flint and St Asaph, as well as a view of St Winefride's Well in Holywell.
For lots of towns, these are the earliest maps that actually show the streets in detail. The street layouts can be very similar to the present. Zooming in on the plan of Cardiff, from Speed’s map of Glamorganshire, we can spot landmarks including the castle and St John’s Church (labelled N), and the key gives us some familiar street names: High Street (labelled G), running southeast from the castle, Working Street by St John’s (labelled K), and Duke Street (labelled Q).
My own favourite part of Speed’s maps is the denizens of the seas around Wales.
Tudur Owen also spotted his home on one of our tithe maps from the 19th century, and was able to find out who was working on the very same land in 1841. You can do the same on our Places of Wales website, where our tithe maps have been digitised and overlaid on a modern map.
If you haven’t seen the episode yet, you can watch it on BBC iPlayer (with English subtitles).
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