| Published between 1720 and 1764 in several
editions with many reprints. Road and County maps of England and Wales, drawn by John Owen, engraved by Emanuel Bowen, sold by Thomas Bowles and Emanuel Bowen in 1720. Road maps copied and reduced from the surveys of John Obilby, 1675. |
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| A brief list of the
editions, re-issues and re-prints:
Thomas Bowles & Emanuel Bowen: 1720, 1721, 1723 Thomas Bowles & I. Bowles: 1724 Thomas Bowles: 1730, 1731, 1734, 1736, 1749, 1751, 1753, 1759 Carington Bowles:
1764 Note that this is a rough
guide to publication dates. A small group of enthusiasts has already
identified 9 publication variations in just the 1720 issues! |
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| This is an electronic copy of the
First Edition (1720). All illustrations are from the same copy, and there has been no attempt at replacing pages containing printing errors or imperfections. Where the impression is not square with the page or is offset in any fashion, it has been reproduced accordingly. The offset errors are a combination of printing and binding faults. These publications were produced in a rather slap-dash fashion with little regard for page alignment or the accuracy of a right-angle (prime example on page 134). The quality of the page layout and subsequent engraving is leaves much to be desired (typical examples - pages 254, 197, 148). The illustrations are approximately 1500 pixels wide x 2700 pixels high (approx 300 pixels per inch) and may be viewed via the paged hyper-links. Alternatively the files may be viewed with any proprietary image viewer, in the directory Pages . File names reflect the publication page number. Opening the book, even numbered pages are on the left and odd numbered pages on the right. Information was printed on both sides of the page, starting with page 1, backed with page 2. Page 3 backed with page 4, etc. Various editions had different arrangements of pages, so that there may not be a consistency of back to back information through different re-prints. As an example later editions have 'London to Tunbridge' (here as page 74) as page 75, backed with page 76 (Tunbridge to Rye). Later editions have revisions to the maps. Some are decoration, some changes to place names, others milage distances and supplimentary notes. In the brief description of road maps, the towns mentioned are not necessarily at the end of the road, or at the end of the road as it appears on the map. The town or towns just appear on the delineated road - somewhere on the map. The spellings in the index descriptions may be modern or contemporary. These maps were produced for the traveler of the day. They were small, pocket sized and contained much in the way of landmarks for the identifying of locations. Ponds, rivers, streams, bridges (stone or wooden), crossroads, junctions are all given prominence, as are regular mileage indicators. Stone bridges were rated in the number of arches and the condition of the road is marked by single or double, solid or dotted lines. Churches are marked as either tower or spire. Inns and coach houses are rarely shown ( a few on p243). Hills are shown graphically as hills, and valleys are shown as inverted hills. Each page has four or five strips, each strip continuing on from the last, to the left. A good indication of continuity and direction is the milage indicator. Early road maps were drawn as a set of folded scrolls. This was replaced by the simpler method of strips, although page 3 still shows a throw back to the earlier fashion. Each road strip has its own compass point for local orientation, but a few maps (p 54, 55) have the compass missing. The maps contain features long removed from the landscape such as roadside gallows, gibbets, beacons, windmills and milestones. Examples of gallows on pages 009, 045, 069, 100 and others. Page 55 has a Hangmans Oak in ye road. Examples of beacons on pages 042, 043, 070, 252 and others. These were used for long distance signaling of distress or invasion. Examples of gibbets on pages 012, 056, 089 and others. These were used to display the corpses of criminals, as a deterrent to others. They may also have been used as gallows. Some maps have slightly obscure landmarks such as lead mines (p155) and coal pits (p220). Spellings are inconsistent - colloquial and yet to be standardised. It was the work of John Cary and the early Ordnace Survey that set the spelling of some place names in concrete for ever. One feature missing from the maps is the turnpike. The first one was introduced in Cambridgeshire on the London to York road in 1663. The practice increased through the early 1700s and rapidly escalated toward the end of the century. Surprisingly it was not until the 1780s and 1790s that turnpikes were shown on maps of any kind. |
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| This CD has been tested on Win98, Win 2000, WinXP, Internet Explorer, Netscape and Firefox. The presentation and zoom facilities will vary with different browsers. The image rendering will be conditioned by the brightness, contrast and colour settings of the local monitor. This product uses 100% recycled pixels. |