Digimap

If you want to know anything about the history of an area in England or Wales, in Scotland is often a good place to start looking for information. Why? I have no idea. But the National library of Scotland has an impressive collection of old maps available online. I had already used it to explore some of the history of my house in the village. But now that I was suddenly in charge of our fieldwork, which was moving to North Wales, it was time I dive into their resources again. And this time, I was going to go via an app you can access if you have a login from university or something along these lines. This is Digimap, and I had already seen colleagues use it. So I gave it a go! For my part of the fieldwork I need a saltmarsh, and I need to sink a core in it. In order to make sure I am not coring in 50-year-old sediments, I have to check maps going back as far in time as they will go. Ideally, the sediments you core in go down to the last glacial maximum within the reach of our limited coring equipment, but well, maps never go back to the last glacial maximum.

Digimap had maps going back to the 1890s, and the area of the marsh where I would like to take a core was already established then. That was about as much as I could do! But it is a nice tool. You just look for a particular location, and then you have tabs that indicate from which periods there are maps available. Not very RSI friendly, but otherwise an easy-to-use tool! If my arms improve might go back there a bit more often…