Old Map of Dorset in 1806 by John Cary - Dorchester, Poole, Weymouth, Corfe Castle, Wimborne Minster

This map of Dorset was published in 1806 by John Cary, one of the leading London mapmakers of the Georgian period. It formed part of Cary's programme of county surveys of England and Wales, produced around the turn of the nineteenth century to give an accurate, up-to-date picture of each county at a time when Britain's road network and market towns were expanding rapidly. Dorset, set along the South West coast of England on the English Channel, is recorded here in the careful, legible style typical of Cary's work, with towns, roads and parish boundaries all clearly marked. Because the sheet dates from 1806, it shows the county well before the twentieth-century boundary changes that reshaped it, offering a genuinely Georgian view of Dorset rather than the later, more familiar county map that most people know today. It is a map made for a working audience — travellers, landowners and merchants who needed to move goods and people along Dorset's coastal and inland routes — rather than a decorative piece, which gives it a directness that later, more embellished county maps sometimes lack.

Dorset's identity has always been tied to its coastline, and this map traces the county along a stretch of the English Channel renowned for landmarks such as Lulworth Cove, Corfe Castle and Durdle Door, even if Cary's sheet naturally shows them as working parts of the landscape rather than the tourist sites they are today. Inland, the map takes in Dorchester, the county town, along with Poole, already established as a significant harbour town on the Dorset coast, and Wimborne Minster, a long-standing market town in the east of the county. Weymouth, on the south coast, appears as one of the county's principal coastal towns. One detail is worth noting for anyone comparing this map with a modern one: Bournemouth, now Dorset's largest town, does not appear here at all, because it was only added to the county in 1974 — in 1806 the area was still open heathland outside any significant settlement. That absence is itself a useful marker of just how differently Dorset was organised in Cary's day.

This Georgian-era view of the county sits apart from our later Old Map of Dorset in 1844 by Samuel Lewis, which was drawn nearly forty years afterward as part of Lewis's Victorian topographical atlas and reflects a very different, more industrial-age Dorset. Where the Lewis map captures the county as railways and Victorian administration were beginning to reshape it, this 1806 Cary sheet shows Dorset as it stood at the close of the Georgian era, before Bournemouth existed and before much of that later change took hold — making the two genuinely different portraits of the same county rather than duplicates of one another. It's a fitting gift for anyone who has just moved to Dorset and wants a sense of the county's older, Georgian-era layout, as well as for collectors setting out to build a timeline of Dorset across different centuries. Every print is supplied unframed and is available across our full range of sizes, so it can be chosen to suit a new home in Dorchester, Poole, Weymouth or anywhere else in the county.