Terry Jones Videos : Terry Jones' Great Map Mystery 1~The Road to Aberystwyth

terry jones' great map mystery episode one -- the road to aberystwyth jones 1

Terry Jones' Great Map Mystery 1~The Road to Aberystwyth

Terry Jones sets out on a series of journeys through Wales following the world's first road atlas: John Ogilby's `Britannia', published in 1675. Trekking over four of Ogilby's routes, Terry Jones suspects there is far more to these maps than originally meets the eye. In 1674 John Ogliby was named to the salaried position of "His Majesty's Cosmographer and Geographic Printer. At that period some of the minor roads used the local mile rather than the standard mile of 1760 standard yards which Ogilby adopted in his atlas. There are 100 map plates in Ogilby's 1675 Britannia Atlas, accompanied by a double-sided page of text giving additional advice for the map's use. Another innovation was Ogilby's scale of one inch to the mile (1/63360). These are marked and numbered on each map, the miles further being divided into furlongs. In this first episode, Terry Jones follows the mapped route from Pretseigne to Aberystwyth (which turns out not to have been a road at all, but a drovers' track through the mountains)

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