[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.

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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.

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

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

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The Gough Map of Great Britain and its Making

Please note that some of the content held on this site is out of date.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Linguistic Geographies project is no longer maintained, and many place-names shown, for instance, need to be corrected. Some earlier findings have also been superseded by more recent work. These corrections will be made when work in progress has been completed.

The current project is the 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 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.

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Leverhulme Trust     Bodleian Libraries