17 JANUARY 1931, Page 28

Now that so Many of us take a practical interest

in the English roads, the Ordnance Survey's new coloured Map of XVII Century England (mounted, 6s., and paper, 5s;) should find many delighted readers. For it reconstructs, on a scale of sixteen miles to the inch, the country as it was in Charles day, with the roads marked from Ogilvy's Survey of 1673, and with a separate map of London before the Fire. Local industries are indicated, and the battlefields of the Civil War are noted. The roads were, of course, very bad, and in the north were few and far between. The Neweastle-Jedburgh road, recently brought into prominence by a murder, appar- ently did not exist in 1675, though a Roman road passed that way. In Essex the Roman road from Hertford to Colchester, now a busy highway, seems to have been out of use. Enfield Chase and Waltham Forest near London were two of the many great woods that still survived. Lancashire and South Wales were still sparsely peopled rural areas. Such are a few of the points that arrest attention in this admirable map, to which a useful introduction by Professor Trevelyan and others is prefixed. It is good to know that the series, which began with a map of Roman Britain, is to be continued with maps of Saxon England and Mediaeval Oxford.

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