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Department of Geography

 

 

The Gough Map c. 1370

To complement the work on Ogilby and to examine the evolution road of the road network before 1675 a schematic GIS of the Gough Map of c. 1370 was created. While the roads shown by Ogilby, represent most of the main roads in England and Wales in 1675, the degree to which the Gough map depicts the earlier road network is a matter of debate. Some commentators only consider routes to be those depicted on the map by the convention of straight red lines linking settlements with distances marked. Others also include sequences of settlements, which lacked lines and distance measures, but which were identical to those along known main roads. We only analysed places with red distance lines. and even here the treatment of the roads on the Gough map is far from consistent. Some main routes are present, others are omitted, and in a few areas, such as South Yorkshire, some secondary roads are also shown. As a consequence, opportunities for the comparison between the Gough and Ogilby routes are limited. Where comparison is possible both sources usually have routes following the same sequence of settlements.

Comaparing Gough routes c.1370 and Ogilby roads 1675

The strong relationship between the two networks is also apparent from comparison of the customary distances between specific settlements recorded by Ogilby and the enigmatic distance measures of the Gough map. In 69 instances measures where comparable and just over half of these the measures were identical. The implication of the strong relationship between Gough and Ogilby is that much of the major elements of the early modern road network were already in place in the fourteenth century.

Gough and Ogilby measures as a graph

Comparing the distances of Gough and Ogilby

In our last Leverhulme grant application we said we would also digitise bridges over major rivers from published sources. We postponed this exercise because of the absence of readily accessible bridge data for many of the rivers made the task too time-consuming.