Old Map of Somerset in 1946 by Ernest Clegg - Bath, Wells, Cheddar Gorge, Dunster Castle, Montacute House

This pictorial map of Somerset belongs to a short-lived but well-loved series that the illustrator Ernest Clegg produced for the Women's Land Army Benevolent Fund in the years immediately after the Second World War. Clegg, working with the writer and broadcaster Donald McCullough, best known as chairman of the BBC's The Brains Trust, combined a conventional county outline with decorative borders and small illustrated vignettes, and the maps were printed by the Leeds firm John Waddington Ltd, better known for playing cards and board games than cartography.

Around the edges of the county outline, Clegg placed drawings of Somerset landmarks including Cheddar Gorge, the Roman Baths and Abbey at Bath, Wells with its cathedral, Dunster Castle and Montacute House, while the map itself records the county's wartime contribution: dairy herds, cider orchards, cheese production, arable land brought under the plough, and the airfields and coastal defences that lined the Bristol Channel during the conflict. Somerset held particular significance for the series since it was the home county of Ernest Bevin, the Labour statesman and wartime Minister of Labour, to whom this sheet was dedicated, and several maps in the run carried an extract from Winston Churchill's 1940 Commons speech promising nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Clegg's MBE, awarded in the 1947 honours list, recognised a fundraising project the Benevolent Fund itself never saw completed, leaving surviving county sheets such as this one to tell the rest of the story. It's a fitting retirement or house-move gift for anyone with Somerset connections, and we reproduce the original artwork at high resolution across our full range of unframed sizes.