The name Camri first appears on maps in AD1050. Since then the Lake District and historic counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire have been mapped countless times.
Cumbria – 1,000 years of maps features more than 100 charts, surveys and maps from ten centuries of cartography, including:
- the earliest maps – when the world fitted onto a single sheet of A4,
- the first ‘county surveys’ – elaborate in detail, destined for gentry parlours,
- tourist maps – from Thomas West’s viewing stations to Alfred Wainwright’s ‘love letters to the fells’,
- historical maps – illustrative trips to the wad mines of Borrowdale and the first attempts to map Roman Britain,
- travel maps – recording the golden ages of canal, rail and road,
- maps of the Ordnance Survey – and the evolution of a military department into the best map-maker of its time.
From geological plots to nautical charts, audacious forgeries to postal itineraries, town surveys to military plans, Cumbria – 1,000 years of maps not only profiles the evolution of Cumbrian cartography, it also celebrates the rich social history of a much-loved landscape.