Mapping the Isle of Wight and its environs

The Ile of Wyght

Looking forward to a short break on the Isle of Wight, armed with the most up-to-date map available, the OS Landranger, sheet 196, which now even includes a ‘mobile download’! As my eye wanders over its crisp folds and its key, marvelling at the detail of the contours, roads, habitation, vegetation, monuments and ‘PH’s, I am confident I won’t miss anything the island has to offer thanks to the cutting edge of modern cartography (even without a mobile download). And so my mind turns to the several other representations of the island over the centuries that I have to hand.

Michael Drayton’s epic Jacobean poem on early modern England and Wales first appeared in 1612, accompanied by a series of charmingly allegorical and mystical maps by William Hole. The one covering Dorset and part of Hampshire features an ovoid island in scant detail, danced upon by the largest of the spirits depicted therein.

At just the same time, England’s most famous cartographer, John Speed, produced his more detailed view. Although its coastline appears rather overwrought it, nevertheless, highlights the island’s slow progression towards almost splitting into three, by the West Yar at Yarmouth, and the East Yar at Bembridge, but for some timely human intervention.

 

One of the great Dutch cartographers of the era, Jan Jansson, clearly borrows from Speed’s Wight Island for his highly decorative representation of Vectis Insula Anglice The Isle of Wight. This appears on his map sheet of the three largest islands of England and Wales, around 1645, complete with pastoral figures, putti, and the coats-of-arms of local nobility.

In 1695, Robert Morden produced a similar map sheet, this time of eight British islands or island groups. Though clearly from a new, if still quaintly inaccurate, survey, it again gives pride of place to the Isle of Wight.

 

Leap forward just over a century to C. & J. Greenwood’s late Georgian Map of the County of Southampton, published in 1829, and the impact of the Napoleonic era with its threat of invasion, can readily be seen. The Ordnance Survey arose out the strategic necessity for the army to be able to move heavy artillery over accurately recorded terrain, and gave birth to the cartography we recognise today.

 

Finally, this review wouldn’t be complete without some reference to the impact of Queen Victoria on the island’s development as a holiday destination (for which I am personally grateful), seen here in this simplified map of the island by H.G. Collins for Clark’s British Gazetteer of 1852. Not only do we see Osbourne House, just south of East Cowes, but also such elegant new resorts as Ventnor, which had sprung up to meet the demand for the health benefits provided by its unique micro-climate and proximity to the sea.

Still don’t see any ‘PH’s, though, so I’ll stick to my Landranger sheet 196 to help me track down a few pints of restorative relaxation after tramping the Isle of Wight’s many beautiful downs and chines.