Old Map of Hertfordshire by John Cary

John Cary’s Map of Hertfordshire

John Cary’s Hertfordshire was produced during a period when reliable road and county maps had become increasingly important to travellers, merchants and postal services. Rather than filling the sheet with decorative figures and heraldry, Cary devoted most of the available space to geographical information. The result is a particularly clear record of the county and its communications at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Map Details

Original title: Hertfordshire Cartographer, engraver and publisher: John Cary Source: Cary’s New and Correct English Atlas Published: London, circa 1809 Area shown: The historic county of Hertfordshire and its immediate borders Orientation: North at the top Original method: Copperplate engraving with outline colour

Roads, Towns and the Georgian Landscape

The network of roads is one of the map’s most noticeable features. Routes converge on Hertford and connect the county town with Ware, Hatfield, St Albans and the settlements farther south towards London. Other roads cross the county through Watford and Rickmansworth in the west, Bishop’s Stortford in the east and Royston on the northern boundary.

These routes help distinguish Cary’s map from earlier seventeenth-century county maps. It belongs to an age of expanding coach travel, improving postal connections and growing demand for maps that could be consulted as practical geographical references.

Hertfordshire’s position immediately north of London is also readily apparent. The neighbouring counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Middlesex and Buckinghamshire are named around its borders, showing the county’s place between the capital and the roads leading towards the Midlands and East Anglia.

Details Preserved on the Map

Cary identifies a remarkable number of smaller settlements alongside the principal towns. Hatfield, Welwyn, Stevenage, Buntingford, Hemel Hempstead and Berkhamsted can all be found, together with many villages, hamlets and individual estates.

Woodland and parkland are represented pictorially, while the hand-coloured boundary follows the irregular historic outline of the county. The River Lea and its tributaries can be traced through the landscape, and the compass-style title piece in the upper-left corner provides the map’s principal decorative feature.

For modern viewers, the interest lies partly in comparing this Georgian network of roads and settlements with Hertfordshire today. Many familiar places were already well established, but the open countryside between them belonged to a county not yet transformed by railways, suburban expansion and the later growth of towns such as Watford, Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead.