07-05-2010, 11:54 AM
For years, scholars have bemoaned the passing of the old Ordnance Survey Two-Inch map of Hadrian's Wall (characterised by a sort of pea-soup green cover) and its replacement in 1989 by a psychedelic, multiple-scaled mishmash, that characterised the dumbing down of all things historical in the eyes/minds of 'content providers'. It is difficult to find words to describe how bad the replacement OS map was, but not as difficult as finding original copies of the older map (which anybody like me, who needed it and had an old battered copy of the original, sought on Ebay - in my case successfully). Apart from the gratuitous changes in scale, the conventions used made it difficult to tell what one was looking at most of the time ('is that broken line lots of short sections of Wall or merely a broken line convention for something else?'). Not one of the OS's finest hours.
Now things have changed. English Heritage have just brought out a brand new map on OS 1:25000 base mapping of the whole thing, reverting to the old clear conventions (black you can see it, red you can't) plus they have gone one better and added the Cumbrian coastal section down as far as Maryport. English Heritage of course absorbed the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments (England) some years ago and it was they who resurveyed the whole thing using the latest digital technology. This has had other information added to it, such as field systems, temporary camps, and the like, and the whole thing is printed on polyethylene (the favoured material for walkers these days, as it is tougher and lighter than the sort of quality paper you need for maps). It is printed on both sides, but it is still vast, and I fancy anybody who started waving the whole thing about up on the crags would soon find themselves hang-gliding over the Whin Sill!
It is comparable with the recent RCAHMS map of the Antonine Wall (although without the crazy blue convention for the AW ditch, which makes the whole thing look like a canal!). Whereas the AW map features a murky green background for everything, the new HW map not only has contours but is also colour shaded for height (although I'm pretty certain most walkers have worked out what contours are by now). Naturally it has the course of the Hadrian's Wall National Trail marked out as a yellow broken line.
I shall be out field-testing it thoroughly in the very near future and will report back.
Mike Bishop
Now things have changed. English Heritage have just brought out a brand new map on OS 1:25000 base mapping of the whole thing, reverting to the old clear conventions (black you can see it, red you can't) plus they have gone one better and added the Cumbrian coastal section down as far as Maryport. English Heritage of course absorbed the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments (England) some years ago and it was they who resurveyed the whole thing using the latest digital technology. This has had other information added to it, such as field systems, temporary camps, and the like, and the whole thing is printed on polyethylene (the favoured material for walkers these days, as it is tougher and lighter than the sort of quality paper you need for maps). It is printed on both sides, but it is still vast, and I fancy anybody who started waving the whole thing about up on the crags would soon find themselves hang-gliding over the Whin Sill!
It is comparable with the recent RCAHMS map of the Antonine Wall (although without the crazy blue convention for the AW ditch, which makes the whole thing look like a canal!). Whereas the AW map features a murky green background for everything, the new HW map not only has contours but is also colour shaded for height (although I'm pretty certain most walkers have worked out what contours are by now). Naturally it has the course of the Hadrian's Wall National Trail marked out as a yellow broken line.
I shall be out field-testing it thoroughly in the very near future and will report back.
Mike Bishop
