In this compilation, Bill Shannon offers a chronological range of maps of Cumbria from his first offering, the extract of an Anglo-Saxon map depicting Britain, through to a map of 2017 recording how glaciers sculpted the Cumbrian fells. His geographical span is also considerable. Modern Cumbria embraces the ancient counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, together with Lancashire north-of-the-sands, which formerly extended as far north as the head of Windermere, and part of the West Riding of Yorkshire: this is the local authority area created in 1974. Even more than this, Shannon, an acknowledged expert on the maps of northern England, is placing his life’s work in the hands of his readers, and they will not be disappointed.
There are no chapters as such, but the array of maps is divided into groups: early maps, county maps, dispute maps, estate and enclosure maps, historical and allegorical maps, travel and tourist maps, Ordnance Survey maps and ‘forming Cumbria’. This aids comparison while maintaining a broad chronological approach.
Many Fellows will have dipped into old maps to help understand the past of an area of interest. This book will immerse the reader in a long story, how one part of Britain has been recorded over ten centuries. One significant element comprises the maps of the German, Swiss, Dutch and finally British cartographers of the Renaissance. Many will be familiar, copies of some will even adorn our walls, but here we can follow the acquisition of knowledge over a period of one hundred and fifty years. To aid comprehension, there are many enlargements of sections of these maps.
The section on early maps is, of necessity, brief, but of considerable interest. The Anglo-Saxon map bears a wavy line crossing Brittannia (sic) at about the location of Hadrian’s Wall, while the Gough Map of c 1410 shows a castellated line at this location, named Murus Pictorum, the Picts’ Wall, a name that survived into the nineteenth century. Politics enter mapping (‘all maps are political statements’) with a 1552 map of the debatable lands between England and Scotland. A few years later, in 1561, we have sight of local politics with a map of a deer park created by one of Henry viii’s officials, Baron Wharton. In the same decade, we have the first plan of a town, Workington. The confiscation of estates after the Jacobite Uprising led to another spate of maps. Many of the early maps are important for place-name studies and indicating the then importance of places now reduced to insignificance, and they help us to understand how modern landholdings came into being.
Although Cumbria today does not appear to have played much of a part in the Industrial Revolution, we are reminded that its contribution was significant through maps of black lead mines, collieries, canals, roads, railways and aqueducts. Through the map of the Lakes in West’s 1784 guide, we glimpse the start of modern tourism; in Hutton’s map of the Roman Wall in 1802, the rise of interest in Hadrian’s Wall. Geological maps started to be produced in 1820.
Some will see this as a coffee table book, but it is far more than that. It is a wonderful compilation in which surprise follows surprise. Who knew that the Post Office created circulation maps to aid the distribution of mail six days a week? Who can remember that Cumbria was once criss-crossed by railways? How many of us know of the Ordnance Survey’s ‘battle of the scales’ and the Treasury’s role in it? Our thanks go not just to the man who produced this book, but also his forebears who created these maps, so many of which are an aesthetic delight as well as a source of information.
