The Gough Map is a fourteenth-century map of the British Isles now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I use the open source tool, MapWarper, to link each identifiable location on the map to its modern counterpart (as found on OpenStreetMap.) I linked 612 locations in total, to give a highly granular picture of the links between the medieval and modern display of spatial information. I then rectified the Gough Map to produce an overlay that “fits” over modern maps of the UK. The rectified map, and the process of producing it, reveals several things about the reproduction of space in the Gough Map.
Below is the warped map:
The medieval map is rotated by 90 degrees so that it agrees with the presentation of most modern maps, the top of the map where Scotland is has been stretched most so that the original rectangular shape is now a wide cone.
Here the map is overlaid on a modern map at 50% transparency:
Overlaid onto a modern map the edges of the warped medieval map accord well with the coastline in the South (especially the South East), with greater divergence in the North.
For me, pinning and rectifying the Gough Map emphasised the degree to which space on the map is defined in relation to waterways. The cartographers take in a great deal of the details of the British coastline and its river systems, and even when these are simplified or straightened in the process of drawing, settlements are often positioned according to their proximity to them (rather than in relation to their proximity to each other). The simplicity of the Scottish coastline in comparison to the coastline of the South of England certainly indicate its relative remoteness, but the emphasis on inlets, estuaries, rivers, and lochs continues. Islands also take a special priority, and are therefore rendered on a larger scale. On the small British island, connection to the sea is what really matters. Beyond this, the map goes to great trouble to characterise settlements by size and importance—both civic and religious—through the symbols that accompany them: castles, bridges, markets, abbeys, cathedrals etc. are all recognised through the combination of buildings that represents the town or village. A second through route, one marked out beautifully by the Bodleian’s own Gough Map project, are the pilgrimage and trade routes between settlements. Here, places that sit along a marked (and numbered) route may be pinned to their locations on the modern map with less warping than more isolated locations chosen to “fill in the gaps”. At the same time, such routes may take in smaller settlements, with less economic or social significance than those that appear on the rest of the map, perhaps because they are the site or a marked bridge, a market, or simply an appropriate stopping place. There’s more work still to be done on this, beginning with the production of a functional overlay that can be manipulated in other mapping software. But here we start seeing medieval conceptions of space in new and interesting ways.