Old Map of the Inner & Outer Hebrides in 1690 by Valk & Schenk - Mull, Skye, Lochaber, Uist, Harris, Barra

Amsterdam, rather than Edinburgh or London, was where much of Scotland's coastline first reached print in reliable detail, and this 1690 map of the Hebrides was issued by the Dutch map-publishing partnership of Gerard Valk and Petrus Schenk, who acquired and reissued a considerable stock of plates from earlier Dutch workshops. Much of the underlying geography derives from surveys gathered decades earlier by the Scottish laird and cartographer Robert Gordon of Straloch, whose manuscript work had already supplied Joan Blaeu's Atlas Novus with its map of Scotland in the 1650s, so this sheet sits within a long chain of Dutch engraving built on Scottish fieldwork.

The sheet takes in the Inner Hebrides around Mull and Skye and reaches west to the Outer Hebrides, where Uist, Harris and Barra are strung along the map's outer edge, with Lochaber and its network of sea lochs filling the mainland coast opposite. Detailed surveying of this coastline lagged well behind the rest of Britain; General Roy's Military Survey would not reach the Highlands for another sixty years, so maps like this one, however dependent on older sources, remained in active use for a remarkably long stretch of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Coming only a year or two after the Jacobite rising of 1689 had drawn outside attention to this remote coastline, the map makes a striking wedding or retirement gift for anyone with island roots in Mull, Skye or the Outer Hebrides, and is offered here unframed in our standard range of sizes.