Ogilby's Road from High Barnet to Oakham

Thousands of miles of roads were surveyed for John Ogilby’s pioneering road atlas, the ‘Britannia’. This sheet covers the road between High Barnet and Oakham, the county town of Rutland. The decorative cartouche features a hunting scene.

Ogilby showed smaller towns in detail for the first time, and it was largely thanks to his influence that the Statute Mile was set at 1760 yards.  

Ogilby devised the project late in life. His modern biographer, Alan Ereira, explores Ogilby's earlier incarnations as a dancing master, soldier, spy, theatre impresario and translator, through which Ogilby survived the turbulent 17th century. 

Ereira also presents a provocative new reading of Ogilby's innovative and beautiful road atlas as a work of royalist propaganda – even expressed through the routes which he chose to include or emphasise.

Condition & Materials 

Copper engraving, printed area measurement 34.5 x 45 cm, modern hand colour, a couple of small marginal repairs, blank verso; published as sheet 45 in the 1698 folio edition.