A New Description of the Shyres Lothian and Linlitquo

Beautiful map of Edinburgh and its environs (modern-day Lothian and Linlithgowshire) with a glorious dedication to King James I in the upper-right.



This map is credited to Timothy Pont, a Scottish mapmaker who produced the earliest known county maps of Scotland. Pont's maps were mostly published posthumously by the Blaeu firm in Amsterdam starting around 1626, though they were not published together as an atlas until Jan Blaeu issued Book V of his Atlas Novus in 1654.



This map of Edinburghshire is the only one of Pont's maps to have been engraved while he was still alive. The engraving was commissioned by the Scottish bookseller Andrew Hart who paid Jodocus Hondius, an Amsterdam cartographer and one of the finest living engravers at that time, to produce a copper-plate from Pont's survey. The plate was completed around 1612, but it is now thought unlikely that prints were made from the plate at that time. The map finally appeared in a Hondius atlas in 1630.



Latin descriptive text on verso. Original hand-colour. [SCOT1900]