Early map of the roads from Welshpool and Caernarfon

OGILBY, John.

The Road from Welshpool com. Montgomery to Carnavan....
London, c.1675. Coloured. 330 x 445mm.

The route between Welshpool and Caernarfon passing Dolgellau and Harlech. Plate 87 from Ogilby's 'Britannia', the first national road-atlas of any country in Western Europe. It was composed of maps of seventy-three major roads and cross-roads, presented as trompe-l'oeil scrolls, each with a decorative title cartouche, in this case with mountain goats and putti. It was the first English atlas on a uniform scale, at one inch to a mile, and the 'mile' Ogilby used became the national standard, the statute mile of 1,760 yards. Ogilby claimed that 26,600 miles of roads were surveyed in the course of preparing the atlas, on foot using the surveyor's wheel depicted in the cartouche, but only about 7,500 were actually depicted in print. It was only after the 'Britannia' that roads started being shown on county maps.

Second state, with plate number bottom right.
Stock ID : 15379