Maps

After recently swapping messages with one of the Gigha residents (Keith) I have become very much fascinated with the library of maps he has pointed me to. For those that know me, geography has never been a strong suit in my quiz knowledge, but now my community can be determined by an Island I am determined to learn more of its geography (and possibly history too).

Keith piqued my interest by sending me a photo from a screenshot that led me to the following website: https://maps.nls.uk/os/ . It led me to a exploring a number of maps but the most fascinating I attempt to describe below with web links to where I started my discovery…….

I found the map above at the address of: https://maps.nls.uk/view/74481007 with a publication date of 1870. We know the Manse was built in 1816 or thereabouts so focusing in on the area gives the image below:

And from that I can draw a line around the Manse and associated land that we have recently purchased:

I found another map from 1882 at : https://maps.nls.uk/view/74488605 that looks great at first glance but doesn’t have the same granularity when zooming in to the area occupied by the Manse.

I next turned my attention to a map titled “The Sound of Jura” from 1926 : https://maps.nls.uk/view/190219055 . Again looks great but granularity is lost when zooming in to the areas I am interested in.

So turned to a more recent affair: https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=17&lat=55.67742&lon=-5.73850&layers=168&b=1 not that much more recent though. This map has the interesting feature of being able to fade in to current satellite technology to see how the land is now – I like it a lot and the following screen grabs are from it:

Interesting? Well to me it is. Not much has changed in the years and our goal is to make the old Manse both a tribute to its former glory and historic past whilst being a comfortable and functional home for ourselves. There is a volume of easily accessible stuff out there if you know where to start. I have given the starting points for Scottish maps but presume ONS maps are equally available for the UK and from other sources beyond?