John Ogilby's Britannia Map Man

That's the M6.

Every day, 60,000 cars tear up and down

this tarmac strip, and they all know exactly where they're going.

That's because their road is on the map.

But imagine a time when there weren't many roads

and absolutely no road maps.

That's what it was like in the mid-1600s.

Then, in 1675,

along came John Ogilby's Britannia -

100 maps describing over 7,000 miles of roads.

For the first time, you could see the routes between places.

These maps could take you anywhere!

The question is - can they still do it today?

I'm going to put Ogilby's atlas to the ultimate road test.

Can I cross the treacherous Pennines from York to Lancaster

using only Ogilby's 17th-century road map?

John Ogilby's Britannia

was the first major breakthrough in map-making since Tudor times.

These maps were revolutionary.

They emphasised routes, not places.

They looked different. They're all presented in strip form

and they show the exact route of the road and only essential landmarks.

Any extraneous detail is cut out,

anything that won't help you find your way.

York is the starting point for my journey. In the 17th century,

it was a much-favoured city amongst the leisured classes.

But journeys to and from York were dogged by poor roads and bad maps.

Ogilby's brand-new road atlas revolutionised travel.

York has four historic gates,

and this is the one that Ogilby directed travellers to

when they were bound for Lancaster.

From here on, it was the perils of the open road.

So far, so good.

Ogilby's map exactly matches the route of the modern A59.

The place names are the same.

Poppleton, Knapton... I'm on the right track.

Ogilby was a child of the Restoration.

He was a peddler and a dancing teacher before becoming a map-maker

at the astonishing age of 70.

He had a shrewd business mind

and excellent contacts in court circles

and he knew there was money to be made

from a road atlas of Britain.

So, how did he set about it?

Ogilby was no cartographer, so he hired in the expertise

he didn't have himself.

He put together teams of surveyors

and, in 1672, he sent them off to start measuring roads.

His only instruction - the surveys had to be cheap and accurate.

I'm going to do some surveying of my own, using Ogilby's methods.

Because I'm not an expert on historical surveying,

I've called on cartographer Chris Beacock.

-Chris, what is this beautifully constructed machine called?

-Well,

this is known as a dimensurator or way-wiser.

If you help me lift it up... As the wheel turns...

-The needle moves.

-The needle moves.

On the dial, you have measurements

in chains and poles and yards and miles and furlongs.

And...a furlong is how long?

There's eight furlongs to a mile.

200 yards in a furlong.

5½ yards in a pole.

-Right!

-So...

-Not as easy as metric.

Metric is wonderful compared to this method of measuring, yes.

So if I want to survey this bit of road,

from the white gate here down to the wooden gate on that corner,

-the first thing I have to do is get the direction...

-Yeah.

-And it's...

87 degrees.

Which of us is going to be the dimensurator pusher...?

I see you're itching to get your hands on it. Before you set off,

we'll set it back to zero so we know where you're starting.

OK.

So it's ready to roll.

Right, this is going to be great fun.

I've always wanted to take a dimensurator for a walk.

Well...

the first thing that strikes me

is that this could get a bit tedious.

You've got to imagine pushing this calibrated wheelbarrow

over thousands of miles.

One of Ogilby's surveyors complained that he was surveying in winter,

pushing this thing through frozen mud and snow and sleet.

Chris has already measured the distance,

so we'll see how good this dimensurator really is.

How far is it, Nick?

132 yards.

That's quite extraordinary.

This machine is so precise.

It's like Ogilby's atlas - simple and accurate.

On a good day, Ogilby's team could manage up to 12 miles

using this process.

I've measured the better part of a mile now, and it's taken me an hour,

and the light's fading.

Must have been a slow business in the 1670s.

One of the most important breakthroughs Ogilby made

was in showing every single map at the same scale

of one inch to a mile. It had never been done before.

It looks like a scroll and it unravels in front of you.

You read it from the bottom upwards

and each strip represents the next section of road you'll travel along.

Each of the strips on the map

has a compass rose to show you which way magnetic north is

and there are two types of road marked - closed roads,

which have a solid line, and open roads, which have a dotted line.

On an open road, if you get bogged down in deep mud or a wagon has broken down in front of you,

you can take to the open country to get around that obstacle.

You get a very frequent marking of moors on this map.

Moors are like mine fields - very dangerous places back then - so you need to know where they are.

When you get to a hill, you know whether you're going up or down,

because if it's a rising gradient, the mountain's the right way up,

and if you're going downhill, there's an upside-down mountain.

Also, every single map has the most gorgeous cartouche

at the top of it. It's an elaborate affair, beautifully coloured.

In it is the name of the map-maker -

John Ogilby, his Majesty's Cosmographer.

It's an impressive list,

but I want to see whether these features are there on the ground.

One thing's for sure - there's some pretty tough country up ahead.

Ogilby's team took three years to complete their survey.

I've got four days to do my route.

The dimensurator's definitely out,

but for measuring a road, a bicycle will do just as well.

Ogilby's route often differs from the A59.

But, glad as I am to get off that hideous highway,

it's not always easy to find where the old road went.

This is really confusing.

I can see where Ogilby's supposed to go - over Keskin Moor -

but where is it?

It must be running parallel with the modern road and I'd guess higher up.

This is incredibly exciting.

I'm certain that this is the road that Ogilby marked on his map,

crossing Keskin Moor.

It bears all the hallmarks of a 17th-century road.

It's as if time has stood still since 1675.

The road follows the ridge line up to the horizon.

On each side of the road - very characteristic of an old road -

you can see the ditches that were cut to drain the road in wet weather.

I'm going to try and negotiate this 17th-century swamp

and then pedal across the moor...

..which Ogilby says will last for two-and-a-half miles.

Two-and-a-half miles of 17th-century morass.

Incredible to think that this was the main road between York and Lancaster.

In Ogilby's day,

this road would have been in far worse condition than it is now.

If you were out here in 1675,

you'd be exposed in the winter to rain, wind, snow and sleet.

If you got stuck here at night, you'd be dead from hypothermia by morning.

Well, I've reached the end of the old route over the moor,

but now Ogilby's road joins the A59 again.

This is Ogilby's route heading off into the rain and the traffic. It looks a complete nightmare.

All of which makes me wonder, why bother?

So, who would have been on this road 300 years ago?

Ogilby's clients, if you like.

The roads mapped by Ogilby were the postal routes used by riders carrying the king's mail.

And they were used by merchants and monks,

all probably travelling on foot or by horse.

And then there would have been a new breed of traveller - the tourist.

Each of Ogilby's routes was accompanied by a commentary

giving useful information for travellers on market days, local customs and good inns to stay in.

The town I'm in now, Skipton,

apparently was well built, it had a good market and good accommodation.

But prior to Ogilby, how did these people find their way around?

Where did they stay? I'm here to meet Donald Hodson,

a native of the Yorkshire-Lancashire borders

and a man who's given a large part of his life to studying Ogilby

and road travel in the 17th century.

Providing you knew where your destination was,

all you would have had to do was go to the local inn

and say to someone,

"This is where I want to go. What's the first day's journey?"

And they would give you a list of places and you might well join them

-on the journey.

-How many people travelled by road then?

Far more than we would imagine.

Um, in any decent-sized town...

there would be 12-15...inns,

each of which

could take 300 people and their horses.

Now...clearly, there must have been thousands of people on the road.

It wouldn't have been difficult to get information.

Is it fair to say that Ogilby...

turned a written list of places into a map,

with the same places but just linked by this slender thread of road?

Yes, absolutely.

He originally planned

to survey 40,000 miles,

and he claims in the introduction to Britannia to have...

surveyed near two thirds,

which I take to be something like 26,000 miles.

But he ran out of money,

so he decides that he'll cut it from 200 roads to 100

and he obviously...

decided this would be a good way to recoup at least some of the money.

-Little knowing it would change the face of Britain.

-Suddenly,

instead of just having one route, you had 100.

Outside Skipton

is Eshton Crag Hill,

this monster.

It's the only hill named on Ogilby's map,

and yet the road doesn't go over it. So why mention it?

What makes Eshton Crag Hill so important to Ogilby?

I've just seen the most incredible sight.

The valley below me is absolutely full of water. It's flooded.

It's as if the waters of the Atlantic have flooded half of Yorkshire.

You couldn't get through there, even swimming.

I think this is a dry-level route

and Ogilby put this hill on the map

partly because he realised that when the valley flooded down there,

you had to have an alternative route.

The course of 17th-century roads was often dictated by water.

Floods could block valleys, rains could turn tracks into quagmires,

so travellers would always be seeking the higher ground.

Not that they'd find the going very easy up here!

Eshton Crag Hill was on the frontier. On one side, down there,

settled communities in the gentle lowland valleys of Lancashire.

On the other side,

up there, the desolate, high limestone plateaus of Yorkshire.

A wilderness!

So, another day, another rain-swept hilltop.

Still another 40 miles to go

and I don't expect any mercy from the elements.

Fantastic change this morning!

There's a gale blowing and it's driven out all that rain.

Today I should make much better progress -

as long as I keep to the map.

A strip map might be easy to read

and reassuring to travellers who have never used a map before,

It just shows the one road you're trying to follow.

If you leave that road, you're absolutely lost. You've stepped off the edge of the known world.

The extraordinary thing is that roads didn't appear on maps

until the 1590s, and even the word "road" was rare.

It occurs once in the King James Bible and a few times in Shakespeare.

People talked about "lanes" and "ways".

"Road" comes from "ride",

a route on which people rode horses.

Ogilby helped popularise the word

and making roads the central feature of his atlas

was his revolutionary selling point.

Not sure when I'll reach Lancaster.

It's spine-tingling to experience this road

as 17th-century travellers did, ruts and puddles and all.

According to the mileometer,

I've now done 76 miles,

so we're onto the last leg.

I'm heading to Tateham,

where there should be a bridge over the river, which might just be here,

if this inn is from Ogilby's time.

Ah! 1744.

That's 70 years after Ogilby's Britannia was published.

Now that's interesting. 1642.

This building was standing before Britannia was published.

It was here when the survey was made.

This is almost certainly the original Bridge Inn.

Well, that's the inn,

but where's the bridge and, more to the point, where's the river?

Something strange has happened round here. It's very difficult to lose a river in a small valley like this.

And they wouldn't have built the inn anywhere but right beside the bridge.

I can hear water over here.

Well, it's a dribble. It doesn't justify a bridge.

That stream must link to a river somewhere,

but there's nothing on the ground that tallies with Ogilby.

All I can do is follow this road

and hope that it's not too far off the old route.

The plot thickens.

Actually, this is really interesting.

Down there in the field, you can see the course of an old river,

and beside it, the old river bank. And over here...

a long way from the Bridge Inn,

is a bridge.

And underneath the bridge...

..the long-lost river.

But at some point, that river has moved from over there

to down here. Very puzzling.

So, who exactly did move the river

and, presumably, the old bridge?

And what's happened to Ogilby's road?

Someone who knows a great deal about the Ogilby road is Michael Goth.

He was brought up near here

and his father was a gamekeeper on a local estate.

I passed this inn earlier when I was looking for the bridge.

Until I can find the bridge,

I can't find the 17th-century road.

It's over the bridge on that picture.

-This picture?

-Yes.

-Who's this by?

It's by Turner.

This is a Turner watercolour - or a reproduction, clearly...

Is that Hornby Castle?

That's Tateham Church. And there...

is the stone bridge.

Now, this bridge has moved, hasn't it? It's not there at all now.

Where's the road gone?

It moved in the advent of the railway, in the early 1840s.

They brought the railway through here and the river was in the way,

so they shifted the river over to one side

and they built a new bridge -

it came down here and covered both the bridge and the railway.

Now, I found the new bridge,

-so where did the road go?

-Ah.

Here is the Tateham Bridge Inn.

Now then, in the 1840s...

a railway came down here, down the vale...

and of course the old stone bridge was in the way, so it had to go.

And so did the river.

So they diverted the river, roughly across here...

-So Ogilby's road is underwater?

-Yes.

No wonder I couldn't find it!

-You've solved a very knotty problem for me.

-Ah, well.

All roads lead to Rome, but this one doesn't.

So, with the news that Ogilby's road got submerged in Victorian times,

the question is - can I rejoin it somewhere in the morning?

I'm running out of time.

Ogilby's map shows Tateham Church very clearly,

so I'm hoping I can find Ogilby's road again up there.

Now, according to Ogilby, the next village on his route from Tateham

is Hornby. On the way, his road passes through this feature here,

Lord Marley's Park.

Now, Ogilby's marked his road entering Lord Marley's Park

at a point due south of Tateham Church, where I'm now perched.

I've taken a bearing from the tower

and it points over there,

into the flooded valley where the river's running.

Now, I think that the road came along below the church,

then cut up into those trees which are probably the old site of Lord Marley's Park.

The road wouldn't run through that valley - too boggy.

So the road's over there in those trees somewhere. The next thing to do

is get among those trees and look for traces of Ogilby's road.

I'm on a track at the edge of the wood

and I've got two ways of testing whether this is the 17th-century road through Lord Marley's Park.

The first thing I'll do is set my mileometer to zero,

because I know from Ogilby's map

that the road through Lord Marley's Park ran for one mile two furlongs -

about one-and-a-quarter miles.

The other thing I can do is look very carefully

as I pedal through the trees

for signs of a carriageway.

You can see the track has been terraced out of a slope.

Now, it's true that might have been done by a bulldozer recently,

so I need to find proof that it's Ogilby's road.

What I'm looking for

are large stones at the road side to stop it sliding away in the rain and drainage channels -

any traces of substantial road construction.

I didn't know exactly what I'd find when I came into this wood,

but I've found the best kind of evidence I could have hoped for.

Down here is a moss-covered wall

that looks suspiciously like a 17th-century water culvert.

There's no doubt about it.

This wall here is not just a retaining wall for the old road,

but it's also a culvert, directing water from higher up on the moor

underground, so as the water pours down, it doesn't wash the road away.

And, actually, it's curving round there,

so up there may be a section of the original road as well.

It's not just a water culvert.

Underneath all of this moss, there's completely intact stone walling

of a 17th-century embankment.

The road crossed the gill and it climbed steadily up here

towards what looks like the apex of a very tight turn, climbing steadily...

There's a huge ravine on that side.

And it comes round the corner.

Here's the edge of the corner. And then it climbs up there.

You have to imagine,

in 1675, columns of pack horses tethered end on end,

30 or 40 at a time, crawling through this forest

around this very tight bend.

You couldn't have managed to get a wheeled vehicle around this bend.

One wheel over the edge,

straight down into the ravine. Absolutely lethal.

No wonder this road was abandoned.

I'm nearly at the end of the track,

and I'll then check the mileometer

and confirm what I think I know.

Well, there's Hornby Castle.

I've come out of the wood.

The mileometer reads...

just over one mile.

Ogilby reckoned it was one mile two furlongs - incredibly similar.

That man was clever, wasn't he?

This must be, then, the high road to Lancaster.

The amazing thing, I suppose,

is that so much of the road survives,

even after 300 years of changing landscape.

Well, Ogilby has led me safely over the Pennines.

His atlas really works.

This has been a much more demanding journey than I ever anticipated,

but, believe it or not, even today you can enter Lancaster using Ogilby's map.

By the time Britannia was ready for printing in the autumn of 1675,

Ogilby was dying.

Right at the very end of his long, eventful life,

this ingenious pioneer lurched onto the Restoration stage

for the final time and pulled off his most magnificent performance.

Britannia was accurate, elegant and gorgeously presented.

It celebrated roads for the first time

and opened the door to a new generation of travellers.

Subtitles by Suzanne Macdonald BBC Broadcast 2004

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