Description
There’s a particular pleasure in spending time with a map like this. Not just glancing at it, but really looking — following the coastlines with your eyes, recognising familiar names, and noticing others that feel just out of reach. It doesn’t shout for attention. Instead, it quietly invites you in.
This map was produced in the mid-seventeenth century, yet it is already consciously historical. Rather than showing southern England simply as it existed at the time, it looks further back, framing these counties as lands that once formed the Kingdom of Wessex. Winchester isn’t just another town here; it carries the weight of an old capital. Wilton still appears alongside Salisbury, quietly acknowledging a moment of change, while Dorchester holds its separate place as Dorset’s long-standing county town. In Cornwall, Launceston retains its prominence, long before Truro would later assume that role. The map is comfortable with overlap and transition — something modern maps rarely allow.
The hand colouring plays its part as well. The borders are not perfectly uniform, and that is exactly the point. Each example was coloured by hand after printing, with small variations that remind us this was once a new object, worked on by an individual rather than produced by a machine. That human presence remains visible centuries later.
What makes this map especially rewarding is the way it responds to patience. The longer you spend with it, the more it gives back — a forest marked where none now survives, a place-name spelled differently, a county town whose importance has quietly shifted over time. Gradually, it becomes less about geography alone and more about how people once understood the world around them.
At oldmap.co.uk, we are proud to offer this map not only for its age or quality, but for its ability to connect people to place and to history in a direct, personal way. It is the kind of map that may be framed and admired, but just as often it is returned to, talked about, and lived with.
That, in the end, is what makes it endure.
