Old Map of Gloucestershire in 1665 by Joan Blaeu - Bristol, Gloucester, Cheltenham, Stroud

Two very different landscapes meet on this map of Gloucestershire, engraved in 1665 by Joan Blaeu from his Amsterdam workshop for the English volume of his Atlas Novus. To the west, the map traces the broad sweep of the Severn estuary and the port of Bristol, already one of England's busiest trading towns and a base for transatlantic voyages; to the east, it climbs into the Cotswold hills, where the wool trade had built some of the county's wealthiest parish churches.

Gloucester itself, the county town, is marked beside the Severn with its cathedral prominent, while Bristol sits at the map's southwestern corner, its harbour drawn in careful detail to reflect its standing as the country's second port. Stroud and the valleys around it appear amid the Cotswold uplands, home to a cloth-making trade already well established by the seventeenth century and destined to grow further with the coming of water-powered mills. Cheltenham is marked as a modest market town, its later fame as a spa still half a century away, while Kingswood and Filton appear as villages on Bristol's eastern fringe, long before their absorption into the city's later growth. The Forest of Dean fills the map's western edge, noted for its ancient oak woodland and long tradition of iron and coal working.

Whether displayed in a Bristol townhouse or a Cotswold cottage, this print carries three centuries of Gloucestershire's geography in a single detailed sheet, and makes a genuinely useful housewarming or wedding gift for anyone settling in the county. It is reproduced at high resolution and offered unframed in a range of sizes.