[Image: Fragment of the Gough Map]
[Image: Fragment of the Gough Map]

The Gough Map of Great Britain

London, the seat of the royal court and government, is one of only two towns whose names are written in gold.

View on the map

Coventry was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in England during the Middle Ages. It is depicted as a 'walled town' with a spired church.

View on the map

Aberystwyth is depicted as a single building with its name faded, but apparently in the hand of the original scribe.

View on the map

The vignette of Inverness lacks the dark outlines and added decorative detail found on the vignettes of towns south of Hadrian's Wall.

View on the map

The Gough Map of Great Britain and its Making

New research on the Gough Map is providing us with more information about how it was made and when.

The interactive digital version of the map accessible here derives from the 'Linguistic Geographies' research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2010-11). 

The interactive map content will soon be further revised and updated thanks to a three-year Leverhulme Trust-funded Gough Map Research Project (RPG-2019-070: Understanding the medieval Gough Map through physics, chemistry and history), based at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. The latest published research on the map appears in Imago Mundi: the international journal for the History of Cartography (2017), 69 (1), pp.1-36.

The project team is working with the publisher Brill, and a volume outlining the research outcomes of the current project will become available after 2025.

Click here for a larger version

Please click the image above for a larger version.

Leverhulme Trust     Bodleian Libraries