George Mark
To illustrate his chapter on Hadrian’s Wall in his 1732 book Britannia Romana, John Horsley commissioned George Mark to produce a series of maps of the course of the Roman barrier. [view the maps]
Campbell and Debbeig
Marshall Wade’s failure to intercept Charles Edward Stuart during the 1745 Jacobite uprising led directly to calls for a modern, all-weather road to be constructed between Newcastle and Carlisle. In 1749, Hugh Debbeig and Duncan Campbell were detached from General Roy’s survey project in the Highlands of Scotland in order to survey a potential route exploiting the line of Hadrian’s Wall.Copies of the map they produce survived and there is some evidence that Warburton, when he produced his account of Hadrian’s Wall, used their mapping as the basis for his published map (even going so far as to copy some of the sketches of upstanding lengths of curtain wall). [view the maps]
Maclauchlan
In the 19th century, the Duke of Northumberland commissioned Henry MacLauchlan (a former member of the Ordnance Survey who was an advocate of shading over contours to depict topography) to prepare a detailed survey of the Roman Wall, which included several site plans. MacLauchlan wrote his Memoir (published in 1865) to accompany the overall plan of the Wall and it was sufficiently highly thought of to be used in several editions of Collingwood Bruce’s Handbook to illustrate the course of the monument and can still be purchased from various outlets as an attractive historic print. Its publication more or less coincided with that of the Ordnance Survey’s First Edition series of one-inch and six-inch sheets. [view the maps]
The Ordnance Survey
In the 1960s, the Ordnance Survey, at the time the UK government mapping body, undertook a series of historical maps based upon their existing map bases. One of these was a Hadrian’s Wall map (1st edition 1964, 2nd edition 1972) which featured one of the most useful fold regimes of any map of the subject, enabling it to be used in the field with great ease (unlike its successors). [view the maps]
English Heritage
In 2010, English Heritage produced an archaeological map of the Wall using data from both the Ordnance Survey (OS) and the Royal Commission of Historic Monuments England (RCHME, subsequently absorbed into Historic England). This incorporated the latest data, but was printed on two sides of a large piece of paper which required re-folding once the walker reached a point near Milecastle 56; in wind, this can prove challenging. This is the currently available map and can be purchased through the PLV Bookshop.