A. Wainwright's Walking Guide Map Style

Wyvern

A repeat of a TV series on hill-walking in the British Isles this past week reminded me of another mapping style that might be worth examining here, a hand-drawn pen and ink style developed by the author and artist A. Wainwright for his extensive series of seven walking guides to the fells of the Lake District, published between 1955 and 1966, based on his own hill-walking, sketching and researching, beginning in the 1930s. While drawing heavily on the UK's Ordnance Survey maps, his own maps take a more pictorial view of the landscape. This is a typical double-page spread, extracted from this Eye Magazine webpage (itself worth a read - and to see another of Wainwright's mapping techniques, showing the distance and direction of other peaks from a given place):

Yes, the books are also all neatly hand-written, not typeset as well!

What we have is a largely top-down view of the landscape, complete with contour lines, but the hilltops themselves are turned ideoplastically to be as seen in profile when approaching from below in the direction shown, and are often much more artistically drawn.

The books remain in-print, now in updated versions, while still presented in exactly this style, mostly as created by Wainwright himself (who sadly died in 1991, three days after his 84th birthday). The only main difference is now the recommended paths are shown as dashed lines of different styles in red, not black, as here (from the images shown on this Needle Sports webshop page):

Much of this could be accomplished using CC3+ now, of course, barring the artistic hilltop aspects, although it might be interesting to have it cast as a specific style at some point, especially as it highlights small regions only, rarely more than a couple of miles (3 kilometres or so) across. (I know B&W mapping styles are often less-favoured, unfortunately, albeit not by me!)

There are more examples, and further details about the man and his guides on this Wikipedia page and on the Wainwright.org website.

Don Anderson Jr.

Those are pretty cool, would be great as treasure maps.