Case study - Gough Map settlements on the roads in Surrey

The plotting on Early Modern roads reveals the extent to which the lower status settlements are stages on particular roads that lead to higher status settlements. For example, Figure 13 shows that the road from London to Winchester runs through Kingston, Cobham, Guildford, Farnham, Alton and Alresford, all of which are settlements with single building icons.

All the Gough Map settlements in Surrey – Bagshot, Chiddingfold, Cobham, Croydon, Dorking, Farnham, Guildford, Kingston upon Thames and Reigate – are located on Early Modern roads. To put this in context, it is worth understanding what other Surrey settlements the Gough Map makers could have chosen to include on the map. John Speed mapped the counties in The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, published in 1612. He did not include roads, but he did map all the settlements. Prominent places were shown with a small icon and partly coloured red. Minor settlements were shown as a circle with a dot in the centre. Counting just the more important red settlements, there are 110 in Surrey (Figure 15). Of the nine Surrey settlements that the Gough Map makers did include, seven were Speed’s red settlements and two (Cobham Street and Chiddingfold) were his minor settlements, but all appear on roads of at least two of the Early Modern maps.