This blog is part of a series to accompany the Wales to the World: maps from the National Library of Wales exhibition, currently on display at the Riverside Gallery, Haverfordwest, until 24 February 2024. Each blog will focus on a selection of items joined by a common theme. This time we are focusing on maps for learning and play. Games have long been used to help children get to grips with geography. Jigsaw puzzles were first invented as a map teaching aid. They invention is generally attributed to John Spilsbury in the 1760s Originally, the pieces were not the ubiquitous shape of puzzles tod ..read more

Let’s get metaphorical (and naked) Glancing at many early maps, you might be forgiven for concluding that women have to take their clothes off to appear on a map. The usual representation of women on many maps is symbolic, with them forming part of the decorative cartouche surrounding the map’s title. However, continents and countries are frequently personified as women, often with roots in classical myths. Philipp Clüver’s map of Europe, first published in 1647 in Amsterdam, appears in Johannes Buno’s Introductio in Universam Geographicum and is a good example. Europa sits on a plinth with a ..read more

Once again this May sees another Carto-Cymru – The Wales Map Symposium. This time we will be meeting face to face, for the first time since 2019. This is the seventh annual symposium and our theme this year is the work of the Ordnance Survey (OS). We will be looking at how approaches to mapping the landscape have changed over time and how historical OS maps can help us to understand our physical environment both past and present.  As usual the event is being held jointly between the National Library and the Royal Commission who are based here in the Library’s building. This year’s event i ..read more

  An exciting new exhibition of maps from the National Library opened at the Riverside Gallery, Haverfordwest, on Saturday 23 September. The maps have been selected from the more than 1.5 million objects cared for in the National Map Collection in Aberystwyth. The exhibition ranges from the oldest map in the library to newly commissioned artworks. Highlights include the first standalone map of Wales, a Cold War map of Pembroke Dock secretly drawn by the Soviet Union, 17th century playing cards on a map theme, and a German propaganda map quoting David Lloyd George. Brand-new artworks insp ..read more

May has arrived and once again it is time for the National Library of Wales and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales to join together to hold our annual map symposium Carto-Cymru. This will be the sixth event in the series since we started in 2016 and this year we are once again holding an online symposium, though unlike last year the whole event will take place on a single day, the 20th of May. Our theme this year is ‘Mapping in Megabytes– how computer generated mapping is changing the way maps are produced, used and preserved and what this means for those who h ..read more

Are you already missing the summer holidays? Then let’s go on a tour of Wales with the Traveller’s Instructive Guide through England and Wales as our trusty companion. Dating from around 1820, and measuring only 13 x 9 cm, the Guide intends to provide all the information the inquisitive traveller might need, including market towns and days, fairs, local members of Parliament, banks and bankers, seats of the gentry, distance from London, and mail coach routes and prices. Information on each county is compressed on to a single page, with a coloured map on the facing page. The introduction promis ..read more

For the past two years, between lockdowns, I have been working my way through a backlog of uncatalogued or partially catalogued maps of Africa, sorting them and adding them to the online database so everyone can access them. We are often told by readers that they did not know we had maps from outside Wales, so I hope this cataloguing project and my blog posts will help more readers to discover the breadth of material we hold.     Anglo Belgian Boundary Commission, 1925     Tanganyika border triangulation diagrams, 1928       Anglo-Belgian Boundary Commissi ..read more

“It would hardly be too much to say that in April of 1895 one was considered eccentric for riding a bicycle, whilst by the end of June eccentricity rested with those who did not ride.” Constance Everett-Green, 1898 Philips’ Cyclists’ Map of North Wales, ca.1890 (Aa 4326) The Complete Safety Cycling Map of England, ca. 1930 (Aa 438) Prev 1of2 Next The boom in cycling in the 1890s transformed the way tourist maps were produced. Mapmakers increasingly produced maps targeted at cyclists, which included road conditions and dangerous hills, which until then had been absent on maps that mai ..read more

The Ordnance Survey began with war in mind, in the shadow of the Jacobite Rising of 1745. The country continued to be mapped with an eye to military strategy and resources, although the Battle of Culloden in 1746 was the last major pitched battle on British soil. Starting with strategically important coastlines in the southeast of England, considered vulnerable to invasion during the Napoleonic Wars, the maps were drawn at a scale of 1 inch to the mile (1:63,360, roughly equivalent to modern OS Landranger maps). Over the next few decades surveyors gradually worked their way across England and ..read more

A new collection of railway plans has recently arrived at the Library; it provides insights into one of the first railways in Wales. One of our major sources of new items for the collection is donations from those who have spent many years building up their own collections. One such person is Alastair Warrington who worked for many years as an Engineer on the Western region of British Rail and later with Network Rail. During his time working on the railways he became aware that large numbers of plans, correspondence and other items were being disposed of by the railways as different lines were ..read more