Taylor & Skinner's Survey & Maps of the Roads of North Britain or Scotland

Taylor & Skinner's Survey and Maps of the Roads of North Britain or Scotland

Old Hall Press, Leeds, 1991. Limited Edition (500 copies printed of which this in number 40). Hardcover Facsimile. Tall, narrow folio (20 x 9.5 inches). Key map plus 61 road maps & 2 pages tables. Quarter cloth over hand marbled boards.

CONDITION
A very good clean copy throughout with no damage. No writing or names to the book. All maps present and very clean throughout. A lovely copy.

ABOUT SCOTLAND'S FIRST ROAD ATLAS
Although John Ogilby had published a strip road atlas for England and Wales a century earlier, George Taylor and Andrew Skinner's volume was essentially Scotland's first road atlas. It consists of 61 plates showing roads across Scotland at the one-inch to the mile scale, covering some 3,000 miles in total, with each page divided into three vertical strips of a particular road. The volume was designed to be folded into a portable accessory for the growing number of travelers and visitors in Scotland.

Taylor & Skinner were originally surveyors in Aberdeen, and whilst the latter was resident in Edinburgh during the 1770s, they went on to work in Ireland in the later 1770s, before heading west to America by the 1780s. Although they were assisted financially by the Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates, and by subscriptions (some no doubt from the landed gentry whose names and properties were shown along many of the roads) in 1778 they reported that nearly half the 3,000 published copies of their Survey were unsold, and they therefore had debts still to repay.

The maps show the detail of routeways including the new military roads in the Highlands (with their relative absence of other detailed maps) and, through their criss-cross network of Great Roads and Cross Roads, covering much of Lowland Scotland to supplement contemporary county mapping.

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