The team at the Dumfries Archival Mapping Project are celebrating this week as a further 120 historic maps from across Dumfries & Galloway have been published on the National Library of Scotland website.
The Dumfries Archival Mapping Project (DAMP) was established to digitise as many pre-Ordnance Survey maps and estate plans of Dumfries and Galloway as possible, concentrating on 18th century hand-drawn cartography. There are several hundred of these maps still in existence and they offer, in their fine detail, a totally novel look at our history, geography and society.
DAMP oversees a team of volunteer ‘map-hunters’ as they search out old maps across the region. The maps of interest are often hidden away in drawers or on walls and, using cutting-edge scanning techniques, are digitised and uploaded to the National Library of Scotland map viewer. The work in the Ken/Dee valley is being supported by the Galloway Glens Scheme, using funds from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
As well as admiring the contents of the maps, the DAMP group also celebrate the technique and skill involved in their creation and explore what the contents of the maps tell us about Dumfries & Galloway through previous centuries.
To access the maps, visit the National Library of Scotland (NLS) mapping website: https://maps.nls.uk/. The website allows the user to overlay the historic maps on today’s mapping layers, highlighting landscape and land use and societal change. The NLS viewer allows the user to toggle between different maps and track the landscape change over time.
Dumfries Archival Mapping Project’s Map-hunter-in-Chief, Archie McConnel, upon hearing the new batch of maps were now available, said:
“This is great! Talk about a team effort! We are always hugely appreciative of the work that the NLS maps department do in giving the maps we copy a wider existence than they did before. We should also send our thanks to Graham Roberts for cataloguing this block of work and indeed the Galloway Glens for their continued support. Most of all I would like to thank all the various map owners for allowing their property to be copied in this way for without them nothing at all could have happened.
Most historical studies to date have been done on one particular place or another but now with this volume of maps we can start to accurately see how patterns of land change emerge and indeed why. So please note we are always on the lookout for further maps to copy in order to fill in even more of those gaps! Please do enjoy them though!”
Chris Fleet, Map Curator at the National Library of Scotland, said:
“We are extremely grateful to DAMP for tracking down and scanning these uniquely important estate plans. Through the ongoing work of DAMP, there are now more online estate maps for Dumfries and Galloway than for any other area, not just in Scotland, but in the whole United Kingdom.
These estate maps are a treasure-trove of information about the historic landscape, especially before the arrival of Ordnance Survey in the mid-19th century. They are always the most popular early map consulted on our website, as they are so useful for many aspects of local history.
The latest release of DAMP estate maps is particularly useful in showing very different types of estate map volume made for different purposes. The earliest for the Nithsdale Estate near Caerlaverock in 1775-6 plans agricultural improvement, whilst another for Earlstoun Estate in 1800 shows new improved farms, whilst later volumes such as those for Craigengillan around 1920 show the sale of land and the growth of shooting and fishing estates.”
Nick Chisholm, Project Officer for the Galloway Glens Scheme which, with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, is supporting the project’s work, said:
Land use has always evolved based upon the needs and the knowledge of the society at the time. It is very easy to look around our hills and imagine that it has always been like this. The next evolution of land use could well be reconstructing elements of it to help with such things as the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. To look forward and achieve a better balance we need to look backwards and understand what it has been. The maps found and preserved for all by DAMP are amazing resource that should be used by all land managers and landscape designers to plan for the future.
A massive thankyou to everyone who has been involved in this project, including the National Lottery Heritage Fund for their award.”
- The latest batch is summarised on the ‘recent additions’ page of the NLS website here: https://maps.nls.uk/additions.html#94.
- The dedicated estate maps site is: https://maps.nls.uk/estates/
- To start with Kirkcudbrightshire maps, visit: https://maps.nls.uk/estates/kirkcudbrightshire.html.
- The Galloway Glens Landscape Partnership Scheme is a suite of projects happening across the Ken/Dee river catchment in South West Scotland, running from 2018 to 2023. £2.7million of core funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund will be matched by a variety of partners to bring over £5million of investment into the area over the 5 years. The area stretches from the uplands behind Carsphairn in the north, through the Glenkens, past Loch Ken, through Castle Douglas and out to the sea at Kirkcudbright. 35 headline projects plus more Small Grants projects all aim to connect people with their cultural, natural and built heritage, and to support sustainable modern rural communities. For more information about the scheme, visit gallowayglens.org.
