Description:

Antique map - FULL TITLE: The Road from Bristol to West Chester

Page 56 shows the Road from Bristol to West Chester via Westbury (Westbury Park), Compton (Easter Compton), crossing the River Severn (Seavern) by the Aust Ferry to Chepstow and Monmouth to Broad Oak and continues via St. Wannerds (St. Weonards), Wormleshamp (Wormelow Tump), Callow, Hereford, Morton upon Lugg (Moreton on Lugg), Hope (Hope under Dinmore), Wharton and Lempster (Leominster) to Ludlow.

The strip map shows the main road and crossroads leading to various towns along the way. The engraving details the surrounding topography including churches, rivers, bridges, pastures, woods, forests and hills. On each strip is a compass rose showing the direction of travel as well as the distance, in miles, from the start point.

Title of publication: A pocket guide to the English traveller: Being a compleat survey and admeasurement of all the principal roads and most considerable cross roads in England and Wales. In one hundred copper plates.

Publisher: Printed for J Tonson at Shakespear’s Head over against Katherine Street in the Strand and J Watts at the printing office in Wild Court near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.

In the preface to his pocket guide, Thomas Gardner wrote, ‘The Itinerarium Angliae, or Book of the Pricipal Roads of England and Wales, …, has been done with so much care and exactness, and esteemed a work so useful, that it wanted only to be reduced to a portable volume, to render it of general advantage to an English traveller’. Gardner was referring to John Ogilby’s Brittania, first issued in 1675 in folio format, and he makes no excuses for making an exact copy of the original, ‘… which is esteemed, as the first, so the best of the kind’.

The engraving has distinct plate marks and good margins. The engraving has been washed & pressed by a qualified conservator and is beautifully hand coloured.

Conditon: GG

Cartographer: Ogilby / Gardner. T,

Date: 1719

Technique: Copper Engraving

Colour: Coloured

Width (cms) x Height (cms): 30.5 x 20.5

Ref: JJB1399