Beautiful sheets like this ar now available online, for free, and to a much better resolution than this screenshot. Click for a larger version and a journey into 1902 Brownhills. Imagery from National Library of Scotland Archive.

There’s a great thing here I’ve been meaning to alert you folks to for a few weeks now – the ever wonderful National Library of Scotland Archive has a whole bunch on new, old maps online – for free.

The previously available 1:10,000 mapping from 1880 onwards has now been supplemented by a whole bunch of 1:2,500 scale maps from the same period. You can browse them at this link here – select a square, and look at the menu down the right side for available sheets. Click on one and the magic happens!

When I started the blog I was paying £18 for each small area of 1:2,500 mapping I was using here – and now, the whole lot in original sheet form is available free. This is momentous.

You can also browse a georeferenced set of 1:2,500 mapping that you can compare to modern mapping at this link here – that continuously scrolls and can be made transparent. You can find out how that process works in this previous post here.

The set is still being scanned, so some sheets are currently missing. So if you can’t find what you want, be patient! Also the site can be a little lumpy and cranky, but we can forgive that considering…

For reference when you’re exploring, probably best to use a computer browser rather than a mobile one, and the maps are sometimes referred to as ’25 inch’ rather than 1:2,500 in the menus. Also take care in the left hand sidebar with the country selection: You get different results with England and Wales, Great Britain and Scotland.

Have fun exploring, and let me know what you find! Comment here or mail me: BrownhillsBob at googlemmil dot com. Cheers.

The NLS site takes all the hard work out of overlaying old maps on modern satellite imagery – this is 1:2,500 1884 laid over modern Google Earth aerial. Click for a larger version.