Old Map of Norfolk in 1807 by John Cary - Norwich, Cromer, Great Yarmouth, Thetford, King's Lynn
Discounts applied at checkout
Size chart below
John Cary earned a reputation as the finest engraver of county maps working in Georgian London, and his 1807 map of Norfolk shows exactly why. It was engraved for Cary's New English Atlas, a project he began around 1801 to update and surpass the county surveys of the previous century, and it was published on the first of March, 1807, from his premises on the Strand. Cary drew on early trigonometrical survey work then getting underway, together with turnpike trust records and local surveys, to correct many of the errors that had persisted in English county mapping since the sixteenth century. The result was a spare, uncluttered engraving style prized for its accuracy: parish boundaries, turnpike roads, and hundreds are all marked with the clarity that made Cary the map supplier of choice for Georgian travellers, lawyers, and land agents alike.
The map covers the whole of Norfolk, from the cathedral city of Norwich, then England's second-largest provincial city and still a thriving centre of the worsted cloth trade, out to the herring port of Great Yarmouth on the coast. Cromer appears along the north Norfolk shoreline, already known for its crab fishery, while King's Lynn is shown as the county's great mercantile port on the Great Ouse, trading grain and coal along the Wash. Thetford, on the Little Ouse near the Suffolk boundary, is marked alongside smaller market towns such as Swaffham, Fakenham, Aylsham, and Wymondham. Cary traces the rivers Wensum, Yare, and Bure as they wind toward the coast, and marks the low, watery ground east of Norwich that would soon become known as the Norfolk Broads.
Anyone with Norfolk roots, or a fondness for the flint churches and windmills of this famously flat county, will find plenty to study here. Genealogists tracing East Anglian ancestors, sailing enthusiasts drawn to the Broads, and collectors who favour the clean, legible style of Georgian county cartography are all well served by this edition. The print reproduces Cary's original engraving at high resolution, so that even the smallest hundred boundaries and hamlet names stay crisp, and it is offered in several print sizes to suit anywhere from a study wall to a hallway.
