Old Map of Cornwall in 1722 by Robert Morden - Truro, Falmouth, Penzance, Bodmin Moor, Land's End

Not every mapmaker of the period worked first as a surveyor and second as a tradesman; Robert Morden ran that equation the other way round. Trading at the sign of the Atlas in London, Morden sold maps, globes, and instruments to a growing market of gentlemen and travellers, an instinct that produced both his 1676 set of geographical playing cards, each printed with a small county map, and his full set of English and Welsh county maps for the 1695 Gibson edition of Camden's Britannia. This Cornwall sheet comes from the 1722 edition, a two-volume reissue that proved the most popular of the five editions the Britannia went through, still carrying Morden's original plates nearly two decades after his death in 1703.

Truro appears as the county town, already developing into a commercial and social centre for Cornish gentry with business elsewhere in the county. Falmouth, on the sheltered waters of Carrick Roads, had been chosen a few decades earlier as the base for the Post Office's packet ships, carrying mail and passengers to Spain, Portugal, and the West Indies, a role fast making its harbour one of the busiest in the county. Penzance, England's most westerly market town, sits toward the sheet's south-western corner, with Land's End marking the very tip of the peninsula beyond it. Bodmin Moor's granite high ground occupies the county's centre, its tors and prehistoric remains left largely unmarked amid the more commercially useful detail Morden preferred.

For collectors building out a set of English county maps from Morden's Britannia, or anyone who wants Cornwall represented by a genuinely different eighteenth-century hand than the Elizabethan Speed atlas or the Dutch Golden Age Blaeu one already in our collection, this sheet fills that gap well and makes a considered gift for a fellow collector. It is reproduced at high resolution from an original 1722 impression and supplied unframed in our standard range of sizes.