That's a substantial expansion to your earlier key, Sue! It should definitely go into the Annual issue's notes, I think, maybe with some short commentaries on unusual features, like the different gallows/hanging wheels and the popinjay, which people may not be so familiar with nowadays. I'd guess few would be aware of the popinjay's origins, given its popular English usage has nothing to do with shooting or archery, for instance.
We seem to have lost the various "meadows" though, and also the salt marsh. The meadow-pasture connection is often thought of as interchangeable now at least, if maybe not historically so - i.e. pasture = grazing land, meadow = grassland cut for hay = winter animal fodder (thus there's a difference between relatively short-cropped grass for the first type, and long grass for the second during much of the military campaigning season from spring to autumn). I note though that "weiland" = meadow, but "pâturage" = pasture from the legend; can't be certain if this was from the original texts or modern interpretation though. Salt marsh is a distinct habitat to peat bogs or inland marshlands however, so maybe needs restoring on the key (or is it that only salt, = near-coastal, marshes are shown on the map?).
As you say, given the military significance of the original, a division of the legend/key of some kind makes sense.
I think maybe the Popinjay should be given back its literal French-English translation, which is "Perch Archery", with the added word "pole", so that we get "Perch Archery pole". That way it only needs a couple of words to explain that it is an archery sport that is still very popular in Belgium today, rather than have to explain that the word has more than one meaning in English, with this particular meaning being rather more obscure than the other one.
Yes, we did lose a couple of the meadows, but the classification Peat bog is the same as one of them. I think that a couple of the classifications in the first key that Khornishman's friend so kindly provided were actually different cartographer's versions of the same hand drawn texture. I'm not sure about that, but it would explain why the second key has fewer meadow fills. I looked for a long time at the stable features of each fill - the number of squiggles and dashes and dots in each line and shape, and the presence or absence of little dashes of colour. Maybe I got a bit confused myself, but there did seem to be only one true wet meadow fill, which is called peat bog in the second key. I only have limited knowledge of the general area to the north of this from a single visit made many years ago when I was a child, but I remember being told all about how much of the low-lying land was once just a gigantic peat bog that has since been drained and become meadow land. Anyway. I will have another look at it today
Marsh and salt marsh. Oh yes! I see now. Yes - the salt marsh got dropped by accident. Sorry. I'll put it back in between Marsh and Mud Flat.
You know... Its a really good job I have a sharp-eyed and clear-minded friend like you, Wyvern. I seem to get pretty confused when there are more than 50 fills to sort out and the same thing has been called different things between 2 keys
This is a screen shot of the key I am working on (left), and the image of the first key next to it (right). The one I am working on has little square images pasted in from the second key temporarily as place holders so that I can see what I'm working on. I chose the second key for the temporary indicators because they are larger and sharper than the first key. That is all. I have no reason to believe or favour either more than the other. In addition to this there are a few I've already mostly done which are showing my own work instead of either key. These are: Arable, Vegetable gardens, River/Canal, Brook, Lake, and Mud flat. Since the key is being drawn on the same template as the example map, these partly complete key swatches I've done are much larger scale than either of the example keys. They are at 1:1 with the map itself (which is the way a legend should always be done).
[Image_13328]
As you can see from the vineyard example, the colour of the swatches taken from different parts of the main map is very different. That's what you get when 100 or so different cartographers work together with inks of different dilutions from different makers.
Bearing in mind this colour variation over the entire map, that makes it doubly difficult to define any two swatches of pasture as being either the same or different. This is especially so when the line patterns drawn in each one are by no means crystal sharp in the original, never mind the swatches each key has extracted from it. (In fact I've had to add a whole map blur of 2 points to the example map to make it look right because digital maps are super sharp)
Anyway.
I'm looking at the wet meadow and drained wet meadow, and I'm thinking that the only basic difference is the addition of drainage lines because the colour difference only reflects the fact that those two swatches in the original key were taken from different parts of the map. If you look really closely you can see that the drainage ditches are identical in nature to the brooks - blue fill with a black ink line down one side. Since there are roughly 50 fills to be created for this one annual, I am tempted to use just the one fill for both of these types rather than make two fills where the only difference is that the second one has a drainage pattern built into it. There are also many problems with having a built in drainage pattern in a fill. More often than not the fill would have to be aligned with the local geography to make sense with the connecting rivers and canals, at which point the little meadow marks would be skewed from horizontal.
What I propose to do is to define 4 new fills. These being:
As to how these might look significantly different from each other in the new annual style to be easily identifiable as different types of land, I think we can use colour as well as line pattern differences, and the fact that both the Marsh and Salt marsh should have little patches of water lying around on the surface.
To be honest, I'd be inclined to retain the "popinjay" title for the archery pole, because that word seemed to be THE thing that came up on all my online searches yesterday for a phrasing like "archery target pole", and it still seems to be the word for such an object used among modern archers. You could perhaps call it "Popinjay (archery target pole)" to reduce the need for additional notes beyond the key/legend. I don't feel "Perch archery pole" really clarifies it sufficiently, unfortunately.
The comparison chart is very helpful, Sue. It looks as if there's scarcely any difference now between the various meadow/pasture fills and the salt marsh one from the original key, though it would make sense militarily to be able to separate them on a map. I can imagine trying to compare the key swatches to the actual map, with all its colour and drawing variations, won't be helping in this at all. Given the differences between the two modern keys as well, you have your work cut-out to make sense of it, I think!
The pasture/meadow question might be resolved by simply calling the fill "open grassland".
I wondered what the lines were on the original key's meadow and drained wet meadow swatches. You're right that it's pointless to include these in the fills. Better just to have a straightforward "Brook/Drainage ditch" drawing tool which will work for either type of watercourse, and can be added wherever needed.
As for the amount of wetland and drained wetland, they don't call them "the Low Countries" for nothing!
Ok. "Popinjay pole (perch archery)" should do it I think. Thanks for doing the research for me on that one
The comparison chart is only serving to muddle me up quite a lot at the moment, since none of the really small details are as visible as they are on the actual map. I've been looking at the first 20 maps on the Royal Library copy for about 5 hours straight now, and I've taken screen shots of my own that show the little squiggles much more clearly than either key. I've also started to realise just how very different each cartographer's style really is. There is more variation in a single fill style than there sometimes is between different fills.
Even more outrageously I've identified quite a few fills that are absolutely wrong in the second key. The sandy beach it shows is actually the intertidal range of the sea (I found the labels for high tide and low tide either side of that band of pale green). The sand flats between the dunes aren't green at all - they're very pale golden yellow like the base colour of the dunes themselves.
The peat bog fill is totally wrong. Peat bog is what happens when heathland or moorland becomes saturated. What the second key shows is a very dark patch of some kind of meadow or marsh. I can't really tell because its not sharp enough. All I know is that its actually wrong, because I found a really large patch of peat bog in the middle of an even larger patch of heathland - both things surrounded in turn by various different types of forest and miles from the coast.
This is the peat bog I've found, beside a more nicely painted example of heathland from a neighbouring map. The blue wash shouldn't be as harsh as that I don't think, but more like the lovely faded washes of the associated heathland texture. Notice how the markings for the tufts of heather are more or less identical between the two fills, and how the saturation of the heather in the Peat bog fill is indicated by the thin horizontal lines between those tufts of heather.
[Image_13329] [Image_13330]
Moving away from the rest of the things that are wrong about the second key - the various marks of the lower lying grassy bits.
This is what I have so far in terms of basic variety in markings. The first was on the coast and on the sea side of the dyke protecting the farmland, so I think it's fairly safe to say that its a marsh. The others I'm not so sure about individually, but they are all the mark variations I can find.
[Image_13331] [Image_13332] [Image_13333]
I suspect the second is a wet meadow, and the third (which covers vast areas of land between the arable fills and the forest fills) I'm nearly 100% sure is the only type of Pasture there really is if you take out the variation between cartographers and ink colours.
The markings are actually very logical if you look hard at them. Starting right by the water with the salt marsh, those strong and slightly curved vertical strokes resemble reeds. The one I call Pasture has much more scribbly marks that are much more bent over and all joined together - like a stylised scribble. It resembles the kind of rough grass you get in Pasture. Meanwhile the one I'm calling Wet pasture in the middle of those two has aspects of both. It has some of the strong vertical markings of the marsh reeds, but it also has a much more scribbled tail on it that more closely resembles the Pasture markings.
Going back to the second key...
Now that I know for sure the second key is not much good on the fills I'm relying much more heavily on the first key provided by the Royal Library via Khornishman's friend - even though the resolution on that one is not as good as the second key. I think this first key is probably better on the fills overall, even though it identifies drained wet meadow as well as wet meadow. I'm looking again at the forest descriptions. These are the screen shots I have of all the different kinds of forest I have found so far.
The first is what I'm going to call Open deciduous forest, the second I'm calling Dense deciduous forest, and the third is Coniferous forest. I may find more types as I continue to examine the map over the next couple of days. The coppiced fill seems likely, but I'm not so sure the mixed woodland is more than a very complicated section of map where two fills have been mingled together by the cartographer.
[Image_13334] [Image_13335] [Image_13337]
In fact I would go so far as to say that the Open deciduous fill should probably be considered a mixed forest/scrubland fill, since the tree shapes are more pointed and more varied than either of the other two fills.
Yeah, I didn't like to suggest the two keys might not be complete earlier; it's disturbing there are so many differences to the actual maps though.
Where there are variants, it would be best to go with those that offer the greatest clarity, I think, given modern map makers will need that (especially for gaming over/with), while still giving an appropriately period look to the whole.
From that, I think the final peat bog colouring will likely be determined by how it contrasts with other types of marsh and wetland. Not having spent hours poring over the original maps, you're far better placed than anyone to say which is preferable!
I had vaguely wondered how the tidal ranges might be shown, given salt marshes tend to be tidal as well, aside from the whole low-lying countryside concept.
It's surprising - or perhaps not so - how similar the various "scribble" marks are to the modern UK OS map symbols for "bracken, heath or rough grassland" and "marsh, reeds or saltings". The first of your "forest" examples is very similar to the OS "scrub" symbol too. Coppicing, at least where still carried out regularly, is a very visible form of woodland management, so it makes sense it would be classed as a suitable landmark.
Maybe title the forest variants as "wooded scrubland" and then just "deciduous" and "coniferous forest"?
As to why both the keys seem to agree that the marsh should be that strange black squiggly mass I've no idea. Maybe, just maybe, the Royal library slipped up on that one, and the second key makers simply copied the mistake. It is this kind of thing I am trying to avoid compounding by blindly copying their examples. I am looking for my own and taking into account the situation where I find each of these fills - where they are and what's around them.
Edit: I'm getting mixed up here aren't I. the lovely blue marsh I called Marsh, is probably most likely to be Salt marsh, given where it is. So now I have to find this mysterious black squiggly thing that both keys tell me is marsh.
Yes. I think you might have hit it on the mark with the different types of woodland there
And spot on with noticing the similarities between the detail of the various squiggles here and the OS. The OS was founded in 1791 - only a decade or so after the Ferraris map was completed. It is likely that at least some of the same expert cartographers involved with the Ferraris map were at least consulted, if not employed. Skilled and experienced cartographers were not something that you could find growing on trees at the time, so it is very likely that the Ferraris map makers created the OS styles we know so well today.
Oh I enjoy it! Nothing better than a tangled mystery to sort out. Much more interesting than watching TV (not that I have one of those anyway). This is fantasy, but at the same time its also very real. I hadn't even heard of the Ferraris map until just a couple of weeks ago, but now I think it's one of the most beautiful maps ever created.
It is interesting to see how you deconstruct the map, finding errors in keys, and figuring everything out. Sometimes I wonder if you pay this thing far more attention that the museum ever did
Oh no I think they probably did. It's just that the variation between different cartographers can be greater than the variation between different types of fill, and then on top of that you have as many different ideas as there are cartographers about what exactly constitutes the ideal green. The secret of identifying the fills and deciding whether two swatches are essentially the same or different lies in totally ignoring the colour and looking at the shape and form of the little ink marks. As Wyvern pointed out earlier these little marks are not very far removed from our own modern day OS map symbols, and I am very familiar with those. Maybe this is what makes it easy for me to recognise the patterns I'm looking at as their raw hand-drawn ancestors? I don't know. But I do know that both sets of legend makers tried really hard to get it right, or the results would have been very much more incomplete and riddled with far more errors than they are.
The moment I first saw the Ferraris map, I was astounded by its beauty. No other map "does it" for me, which is why I asked for someone to look at the style. Actually, I'd first asked for it about 10 years ago, but none took it up.
One thing that folks need to keep in mind is that the different terrains, which we have been referring to as fills, would be significant in the minds of the cartographers, but more importantly for the military leaders who used the maps in their planning. Certain types of wet grounds would take infantry, possibly cavalry, but not the weight of artillery, and as it got progressively "wetter" eventually it would be useless for even infantry to try to cross. This would be intimately known by the professionals of the age, probably to the point of knowing the relative water content based on the variation of the term used.
Of course, water would not be the only variable they considered, but also the thickness of the undergrowth, the difficulty of getting through leafy foliage, etc. The same applies to the variations of the roads, especially when it comes to sunken roads as they were ready-made cover and/or concealment, although they did not tend to fight from such locations, they were useful in other ways.
Basically, my point is that from the wargamer/end-user perspective, the more variations available, the more popular a style it will be.
Where you can logically reduce the number of fills to work on, thus reducing your workload, is great, but where there may be some real distinctions at the wargaming and historical military level, such distinctions will make a difference.
I cannot wait to purchase this annual, literally. I won't be using any other styles for a long time to come.
I can understand the concern about having sufficient fills to properly illustrate the ground as it is, but I assure you that there will be just as many as are actually in the map. In fact I've discovered one about an hour ago that is definitely not in either of the two legends. I've called it Heath scrub. It's not just an area that someone forgot to paint green under the tree symbols. If you look at the ground you can see that it's definitely heath symbols, and that the colour of it is the same as the other heath swatch I've taken. And those are trees very similar in format to the trees of the fill that Wyvern and I decided to call Woodland scrub (or similar) for now.
[Image_13341]
I'm hoping to find more little gems like this one. Don't know if this is weird, but I get a kick out of discovering stuff that hundreds of other people have missed through the years.
I've seen that one on a few of the other map sections.
One of the things that returns to my mind as I view the map is the fact that that a house, depicted as an individual dwelling, had someone living in it when the surveyors went through the area. One could have followed the map and found and met each of the persons or families living in the specific buildings drawn on the map.
Nowadays, most maps, beyond Google Street View which isn't technically a map at all, only show generalizations. Although, most cities do have a map of their environs, complete with the individual houses and buildings, but those are rarely seen by the public. I used to have a 12' x 12' map of Shreveport, Louisana on my wall, when I lived there. I could see the house I lived in as an individual building, along with all of the other houses and apartments. It was really something.
I've seen that one on a few of the other map sections.
One of the things that returns to my mind as I view the map is the fact that that a house, depicted as an individual dwelling, had someone living in it when the surveyors went through the area. One could have followed the map and found and met each of the persons or families living in the specific buildings drawn on the map.
Nowadays, most maps, beyond Google Street View which isn't technically a map at all, only show generalizations. Although, most cities do have a map of their environs, complete with the individual houses and buildings, but those are rarely seen by the public. I used to have a 12' x 12' map of Shreveport, Louisana on my wall, when I lived there. I could see the house I lived in as an individual building, along with all of the other houses and apartments. It was really something.
Oh. LOL! Then I will just take it as a personal discovery that both the sets of Legend makers seem to have overlooked Are there any others you've seen that don't appear in either of them? I got up to map 33 before I had to break off last night to make sure I wasn't starting to glaze over. Looking at these maps is oddly addictive, but at the same time it's like reading an interesting but incredibly long novel. You have to take a break and resume a while later
For me the beauty of the map is the little quirks of hand that happen in any hand drawn map. The personality of the draughtsmen (I really doubt that any women were involved at that point in history). Even if the joins between sections done by different people weren't so obvious by varying degrees of ageing and wear, it would still be pretty obvious to me when I cross from one map-maker's realm into another by the style of the marks. Here there is one who is fastidiously careful to make his marks as similar and correct as possible, and here there is one who is perhaps a little bored. His marks are looser and less disciplined, as if he is drawing at great speed and just wants to get this bit finished and go home. And then there is the artist right next door to that, where every mark is unique and deliberately variable despite his obviously superior skill - the man who takes a joy in this work and treats it more like a very fine ink and wash master class than a map.
Google street view has nothing on the Ferraris map, and I'm afraid that I have looked at so many OS maps over the years I spent working in a county planning department that I just find them cold and a bit boring after the first 5 minutes or so. They are tools, not works of art.
Posted By: QuentenThis whole project is like assembling a Google Earth view, bit by bit. It is SO exciting. Roll on 2020
And I found a much better depiction of "Marsh" than the black squiggly things that appear in the existing legends. You can actually see what it is in this one. I should be able to make a nice texture now I understand the black squiggles are meant to be the mud at the margin between plant and water.
Sue, at the risk of distracting too much from the Ferraris mapping, it's interesting the OS:Ferraris symbol similarities are chiefly with those from the more modern OS maps. The earlier printed OS maps (the 25 inch to the mile and 6 inch to the mile maps from the 1840s to the 1950s, for instance) had a much greater range of vegetation schemes and drawings than is now the case, to the point of identifying certain specific tree species. This National Library of Scotland page shows samples of the printing stamps used on the larger-scale 1/500, 1/2500 and 6 inch = 1/10,560 maps, the original page dated to 1886 (if nothing else proving that repeating fill patterns are not merely a modern problem!). This PDF from the groundsure.com site has a handy comparison between the illustrated feature symbols used on the "County" (loosely the 1840s-1950s) and "National Grid" (roughly the 1940s onwards) OS map series' which helps illustrate the changes better.
Of course, even the earlier the OS maps were printed, not hand-drawn, hence their "mechanical" appearance that you found so off-putting.
Sadly, you're right about few to no women being involved in cartographical drawing prior to the Second World War in Britain. This page has some notes (see especially item 10 towards the foot of the page for OS wartime cartographers).
Good to see you've been making further progress identifying and clarifying others of the fill/potential fill styles from Ferraris. I had wondered what those Marsh features were - I'd thought small meandering channels rather than ponds though.
I've been looking for some better reference material to figure out just how I'm finding these symbols so familiar. At first glance they don't look anything alike, but if you analyse the lines as a set of numbers and directions (3 vertical, one horizontal squiggle, for example) they are clearly related. I did some more reading since I inferred that the OS might have been strongly influenced by the Ferraris map, and I've discovered that the UK defence forces started surveying the UK a few decades before the Ferraris map following 'the uprising' in Scotland. So maybe what these maps convey is more about the fashion of the day than either being triggered by the other.
I don't dislike machine printed maps. They are just less interesting than hand drawn ones. I know that by creating this new CC3 style I am basically making something much less beautiful than the Ferraris map, but I hope it will be useful for people who would like to make maps in a similar style.
Sexism in the employment sector, sadly, was tackled too late for me to be able to follow my initial dream of becoming an OS cartographer. Ironically I came across a chance to join in later life and applied, only to be rejected because I was 2 months over the upper age limit. That's the government for you - one law for us ordinary civilians, quite a different one for the civil services.
I think the reason that particular sample of marsh was so clear was because the other samples were taken of patches of marsh where the cartographer had applied a much smaller scale to the drawing of the texture. The person left with the job of painting it then had little choice but to try and squash all the required colours into a much tinier space, which usually results in something of a jumble - hence the strange black squiggles. If you mix blue with brown you get black. I don't think those other marshes were ever intended to be so dark. It's just that they were too tiny for the inks not to mix.
Here's a texture that by its position and colour should really be classified as Salt marsh. Its from the drowned village of saeftinghe, which was built on a polder that was flooded and reclaimed by the sea in 1584 - 200 years before the Ferraris map. If you do an image search for saeftinghe today the area is now very clearly salt marsh, but the texture is different here to the salt marsh texture that occurs almost everywhere else there is salt marsh. I'm wondering if this is just a quirk of the particular cartographer who did this piece, or if the difference is significant - land lost to the sea perhaps?
The usual form of the salt marsh is on the left, with this new texture on the right.
That fill is probably an intermission between changes in water saturation/density at the time the map was done. Look at this map snippet here, from the Sluys #23 section.
Looking along the coast, there's quite a lot of the fill on the right, from your post.
The "usual" salt marsh looks to be a lot easier to draw, than the far more numerous squiggles which are at varying, but much higher densities than the tufts of the marsh grass as shown.
However, looking other areas on nearby sections or even the same section, it may be that the squiggles on the right are "more wet," but not yet marshy. Looking at the pond/lake in the snippet here, we see the same fill in what would likely be lower lying ground with a higher water saturation.
Looking at this snippet, which is the zoomy map's view of sections #44 and #45, the variation may well be due to the cartographers, but also looking at the mix of fills, I'm not 100% sure. You can clearly see the nearly-horizontal divide of the different sections, with a significant variation in the fill used, but that variation extends as you go south, only, so that may be due to the actual ground and not merely a tired or lazy artist.
Also, I think you may want to just make the directional arrow for the water current a symbol and not a fill as you have it on your list. Looking at other sections of the map, the narrower tracts of water have the arrows outside the water.
Umm. I'm just a little confused about these varying degrees of wetness, especially since the fill on the right in my last post is only different from the pasture fill I identified earlier in terms of it being much more blue.
Assuming that we have several degrees of wetness here, I can do them all, but what do I call them?
And here's another one I found that I've temporarily called Mature salt marsh. So we have at least 3 different types of salt marsh - possibly more than that. I think we need to sort out a range - a way of ranking them in terms of wetness/density.
Comments
I enjoy the interaction and the feedback is valuable
We seem to have lost the various "meadows" though, and also the salt marsh. The meadow-pasture connection is often thought of as interchangeable now at least, if maybe not historically so - i.e. pasture = grazing land, meadow = grassland cut for hay = winter animal fodder (thus there's a difference between relatively short-cropped grass for the first type, and long grass for the second during much of the military campaigning season from spring to autumn). I note though that "weiland" = meadow, but "pâturage" = pasture from the legend; can't be certain if this was from the original texts or modern interpretation though. Salt marsh is a distinct habitat to peat bogs or inland marshlands however, so maybe needs restoring on the key (or is it that only salt, = near-coastal, marshes are shown on the map?).
As you say, given the military significance of the original, a division of the legend/key of some kind makes sense.
Yes, we did lose a couple of the meadows, but the classification Peat bog is the same as one of them. I think that a couple of the classifications in the first key that Khornishman's friend so kindly provided were actually different cartographer's versions of the same hand drawn texture. I'm not sure about that, but it would explain why the second key has fewer meadow fills. I looked for a long time at the stable features of each fill - the number of squiggles and dashes and dots in each line and shape, and the presence or absence of little dashes of colour. Maybe I got a bit confused myself, but there did seem to be only one true wet meadow fill, which is called peat bog in the second key. I only have limited knowledge of the general area to the north of this from a single visit made many years ago when I was a child, but I remember being told all about how much of the low-lying land was once just a gigantic peat bog that has since been drained and become meadow land. Anyway. I will have another look at it today
Marsh and salt marsh. Oh yes! I see now. Yes - the salt marsh got dropped by accident. Sorry. I'll put it back in between Marsh and Mud Flat.
You know... Its a really good job I have a sharp-eyed and clear-minded friend like you, Wyvern. I seem to get pretty confused when there are more than 50 fills to sort out and the same thing has been called different things between 2 keys
This is a screen shot of the key I am working on (left), and the image of the first key next to it (right). The one I am working on has little square images pasted in from the second key temporarily as place holders so that I can see what I'm working on. I chose the second key for the temporary indicators because they are larger and sharper than the first key. That is all. I have no reason to believe or favour either more than the other. In addition to this there are a few I've already mostly done which are showing my own work instead of either key. These are: Arable, Vegetable gardens, River/Canal, Brook, Lake, and Mud flat. Since the key is being drawn on the same template as the example map, these partly complete key swatches I've done are much larger scale than either of the example keys. They are at 1:1 with the map itself (which is the way a legend should always be done).
[Image_13328]
As you can see from the vineyard example, the colour of the swatches taken from different parts of the main map is very different. That's what you get when 100 or so different cartographers work together with inks of different dilutions from different makers.
Bearing in mind this colour variation over the entire map, that makes it doubly difficult to define any two swatches of pasture as being either the same or different. This is especially so when the line patterns drawn in each one are by no means crystal sharp in the original, never mind the swatches each key has extracted from it. (In fact I've had to add a whole map blur of 2 points to the example map to make it look right because digital maps are super sharp)
Anyway.
I'm looking at the wet meadow and drained wet meadow, and I'm thinking that the only basic difference is the addition of drainage lines because the colour difference only reflects the fact that those two swatches in the original key were taken from different parts of the map. If you look really closely you can see that the drainage ditches are identical in nature to the brooks - blue fill with a black ink line down one side. Since there are roughly 50 fills to be created for this one annual, I am tempted to use just the one fill for both of these types rather than make two fills where the only difference is that the second one has a drainage pattern built into it. There are also many problems with having a built in drainage pattern in a fill. More often than not the fill would have to be aligned with the local geography to make sense with the connecting rivers and canals, at which point the little meadow marks would be skewed from horizontal.
What I propose to do is to define 4 new fills. These being:
- Pasture (or meadow)
- Wet meadow
- Marsh
- Salt marsh
As to how these might look significantly different from each other in the new annual style to be easily identifiable as different types of land, I think we can use colour as well as line pattern differences, and the fact that both the Marsh and Salt marsh should have little patches of water lying around on the surface.
The comparison chart is very helpful, Sue. It looks as if there's scarcely any difference now between the various meadow/pasture fills and the salt marsh one from the original key, though it would make sense militarily to be able to separate them on a map. I can imagine trying to compare the key swatches to the actual map, with all its colour and drawing variations, won't be helping in this at all. Given the differences between the two modern keys as well, you have your work cut-out to make sense of it, I think!
The pasture/meadow question might be resolved by simply calling the fill "open grassland".
I wondered what the lines were on the original key's meadow and drained wet meadow swatches. You're right that it's pointless to include these in the fills. Better just to have a straightforward "Brook/Drainage ditch" drawing tool which will work for either type of watercourse, and can be added wherever needed.
As for the amount of wetland and drained wetland, they don't call them "the Low Countries" for nothing!
The comparison chart is only serving to muddle me up quite a lot at the moment, since none of the really small details are as visible as they are on the actual map. I've been looking at the first 20 maps on the Royal Library copy for about 5 hours straight now, and I've taken screen shots of my own that show the little squiggles much more clearly than either key. I've also started to realise just how very different each cartographer's style really is. There is more variation in a single fill style than there sometimes is between different fills.
Even more outrageously I've identified quite a few fills that are absolutely wrong in the second key. The sandy beach it shows is actually the intertidal range of the sea (I found the labels for high tide and low tide either side of that band of pale green). The sand flats between the dunes aren't green at all - they're very pale golden yellow like the base colour of the dunes themselves.
The peat bog fill is totally wrong. Peat bog is what happens when heathland or moorland becomes saturated. What the second key shows is a very dark patch of some kind of meadow or marsh. I can't really tell because its not sharp enough. All I know is that its actually wrong, because I found a really large patch of peat bog in the middle of an even larger patch of heathland - both things surrounded in turn by various different types of forest and miles from the coast.
This is the peat bog I've found, beside a more nicely painted example of heathland from a neighbouring map. The blue wash shouldn't be as harsh as that I don't think, but more like the lovely faded washes of the associated heathland texture. Notice how the markings for the tufts of heather are more or less identical between the two fills, and how the saturation of the heather in the Peat bog fill is indicated by the thin horizontal lines between those tufts of heather.
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Moving away from the rest of the things that are wrong about the second key - the various marks of the lower lying grassy bits.
This is what I have so far in terms of basic variety in markings. The first was on the coast and on the sea side of the dyke protecting the farmland, so I think it's fairly safe to say that its a marsh. The others I'm not so sure about individually, but they are all the mark variations I can find.
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I suspect the second is a wet meadow, and the third (which covers vast areas of land between the arable fills and the forest fills) I'm nearly 100% sure is the only type of Pasture there really is if you take out the variation between cartographers and ink colours.
The markings are actually very logical if you look hard at them. Starting right by the water with the salt marsh, those strong and slightly curved vertical strokes resemble reeds. The one I call Pasture has much more scribbly marks that are much more bent over and all joined together - like a stylised scribble. It resembles the kind of rough grass you get in Pasture. Meanwhile the one I'm calling Wet pasture in the middle of those two has aspects of both. It has some of the strong vertical markings of the marsh reeds, but it also has a much more scribbled tail on it that more closely resembles the Pasture markings.
Going back to the second key...
Now that I know for sure the second key is not much good on the fills I'm relying much more heavily on the first key provided by the Royal Library via Khornishman's friend - even though the resolution on that one is not as good as the second key. I think this first key is probably better on the fills overall, even though it identifies drained wet meadow as well as wet meadow. I'm looking again at the forest descriptions. These are the screen shots I have of all the different kinds of forest I have found so far.
The first is what I'm going to call Open deciduous forest, the second I'm calling Dense deciduous forest, and the third is Coniferous forest. I may find more types as I continue to examine the map over the next couple of days. The coppiced fill seems likely, but I'm not so sure the mixed woodland is more than a very complicated section of map where two fills have been mingled together by the cartographer.
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In fact I would go so far as to say that the Open deciduous fill should probably be considered a mixed forest/scrubland fill, since the tree shapes are more pointed and more varied than either of the other two fills.
Where there are variants, it would be best to go with those that offer the greatest clarity, I think, given modern map makers will need that (especially for gaming over/with), while still giving an appropriately period look to the whole.
From that, I think the final peat bog colouring will likely be determined by how it contrasts with other types of marsh and wetland. Not having spent hours poring over the original maps, you're far better placed than anyone to say which is preferable!
I had vaguely wondered how the tidal ranges might be shown, given salt marshes tend to be tidal as well, aside from the whole low-lying countryside concept.
It's surprising - or perhaps not so - how similar the various "scribble" marks are to the modern UK OS map symbols for "bracken, heath or rough grassland" and "marsh, reeds or saltings". The first of your "forest" examples is very similar to the OS "scrub" symbol too. Coppicing, at least where still carried out regularly, is a very visible form of woodland management, so it makes sense it would be classed as a suitable landmark.
Maybe title the forest variants as "wooded scrubland" and then just "deciduous" and "coniferous forest"?
Edit: I'm getting mixed up here aren't I. the lovely blue marsh I called Marsh, is probably most likely to be Salt marsh, given where it is. So now I have to find this mysterious black squiggly thing that both keys tell me is marsh.
And spot on with noticing the similarities between the detail of the various squiggles here and the OS. The OS was founded in 1791 - only a decade or so after the Ferraris map was completed. It is likely that at least some of the same expert cartographers involved with the Ferraris map were at least consulted, if not employed. Skilled and experienced cartographers were not something that you could find growing on trees at the time, so it is very likely that the Ferraris map makers created the OS styles we know so well today.
Good analysis, in my view, so far.
The moment I first saw the Ferraris map, I was astounded by its beauty. No other map "does it" for me, which is why I asked for someone to look at the style. Actually, I'd first asked for it about 10 years ago, but none took it up.
One thing that folks need to keep in mind is that the different terrains, which we have been referring to as fills, would be significant in the minds of the cartographers, but more importantly for the military leaders who used the maps in their planning. Certain types of wet grounds would take infantry, possibly cavalry, but not the weight of artillery, and as it got progressively "wetter" eventually it would be useless for even infantry to try to cross. This would be intimately known by the professionals of the age, probably to the point of knowing the relative water content based on the variation of the term used.
Of course, water would not be the only variable they considered, but also the thickness of the undergrowth, the difficulty of getting through leafy foliage, etc. The same applies to the variations of the roads, especially when it comes to sunken roads as they were ready-made cover and/or concealment, although they did not tend to fight from such locations, they were useful in other ways.
Basically, my point is that from the wargamer/end-user perspective, the more variations available, the more popular a style it will be.
Where you can logically reduce the number of fills to work on, thus reducing your workload, is great, but where there may be some real distinctions at the wargaming and historical military level, such distinctions will make a difference.
I cannot wait to purchase this annual, literally. I won't be using any other styles for a long time to come.
I can understand the concern about having sufficient fills to properly illustrate the ground as it is, but I assure you that there will be just as many as are actually in the map. In fact I've discovered one about an hour ago that is definitely not in either of the two legends. I've called it Heath scrub. It's not just an area that someone forgot to paint green under the tree symbols. If you look at the ground you can see that it's definitely heath symbols, and that the colour of it is the same as the other heath swatch I've taken. And those are trees very similar in format to the trees of the fill that Wyvern and I decided to call Woodland scrub (or similar) for now.
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I'm hoping to find more little gems like this one. Don't know if this is weird, but I get a kick out of discovering stuff that hundreds of other people have missed through the years.
I've seen that one on a few of the other map sections.
One of the things that returns to my mind as I view the map is the fact that that a house, depicted as an individual dwelling, had someone living in it when the surveyors went through the area. One could have followed the map and found and met each of the persons or families living in the specific buildings drawn on the map.
Nowadays, most maps, beyond Google Street View which isn't technically a map at all, only show generalizations. Although, most cities do have a map of their environs, complete with the individual houses and buildings, but those are rarely seen by the public. I used to have a 12' x 12' map of Shreveport, Louisana on my wall, when I lived there. I could see the house I lived in as an individual building, along with all of the other houses and apartments. It was really something.
For me the beauty of the map is the little quirks of hand that happen in any hand drawn map. The personality of the draughtsmen (I really doubt that any women were involved at that point in history). Even if the joins between sections done by different people weren't so obvious by varying degrees of ageing and wear, it would still be pretty obvious to me when I cross from one map-maker's realm into another by the style of the marks. Here there is one who is fastidiously careful to make his marks as similar and correct as possible, and here there is one who is perhaps a little bored. His marks are looser and less disciplined, as if he is drawing at great speed and just wants to get this bit finished and go home. And then there is the artist right next door to that, where every mark is unique and deliberately variable despite his obviously superior skill - the man who takes a joy in this work and treats it more like a very fine ink and wash master class than a map.
Google street view has nothing on the Ferraris map, and I'm afraid that I have looked at so many OS maps over the years I spent working in a county planning department that I just find them cold and a bit boring after the first 5 minutes or so. They are tools, not works of art. I'm glad you are enjoying it so much
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Of course, even the earlier the OS maps were printed, not hand-drawn, hence their "mechanical" appearance that you found so off-putting.
Sadly, you're right about few to no women being involved in cartographical drawing prior to the Second World War in Britain. This page has some notes (see especially item 10 towards the foot of the page for OS wartime cartographers).
Good to see you've been making further progress identifying and clarifying others of the fill/potential fill styles from Ferraris. I had wondered what those Marsh features were - I'd thought small meandering channels rather than ponds though.
I've been looking for some better reference material to figure out just how I'm finding these symbols so familiar. At first glance they don't look anything alike, but if you analyse the lines as a set of numbers and directions (3 vertical, one horizontal squiggle, for example) they are clearly related. I did some more reading since I inferred that the OS might have been strongly influenced by the Ferraris map, and I've discovered that the UK defence forces started surveying the UK a few decades before the Ferraris map following 'the uprising' in Scotland. So maybe what these maps convey is more about the fashion of the day than either being triggered by the other.
I don't dislike machine printed maps. They are just less interesting than hand drawn ones. I know that by creating this new CC3 style I am basically making something much less beautiful than the Ferraris map, but I hope it will be useful for people who would like to make maps in a similar style.
Sexism in the employment sector, sadly, was tackled too late for me to be able to follow my initial dream of becoming an OS cartographer. Ironically I came across a chance to join in later life and applied, only to be rejected because I was 2 months over the upper age limit. That's the government for you - one law for us ordinary civilians, quite a different one for the civil services.
I think the reason that particular sample of marsh was so clear was because the other samples were taken of patches of marsh where the cartographer had applied a much smaller scale to the drawing of the texture. The person left with the job of painting it then had little choice but to try and squash all the required colours into a much tinier space, which usually results in something of a jumble - hence the strange black squiggles. If you mix blue with brown you get black. I don't think those other marshes were ever intended to be so dark. It's just that they were too tiny for the inks not to mix.
The usual form of the salt marsh is on the left, with this new texture on the right.
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That fill is probably an intermission between changes in water saturation/density at the time the map was done. Look at this map snippet here, from the Sluys #23 section.
The "usual" salt marsh looks to be a lot easier to draw, than the far more numerous squiggles which are at varying, but much higher densities than the tufts of the marsh grass as shown.
Also, I think you may want to just make the directional arrow for the water current a symbol and not a fill as you have it on your list. Looking at other sections of the map, the narrower tracts of water have the arrows outside the water.
Assuming that we have several degrees of wetness here, I can do them all, but what do I call them?
And here's another one I found that I've temporarily called Mature salt marsh. So we have at least 3 different types of salt marsh - possibly more than that. I think we need to sort out a range - a way of ranking them in terms of wetness/density.
Don't forget that the legend will show both fills and symbols