Evidence of Imperial Rome’s charting of Britain comes in the form of the Peutinger Table, the Antonine itineraries and the Ravenna Cosmography. They are copies taken from earlier maps, tables and itineraries. The truth is that there is currently no, known, example in existence of a Roman map made in England unless you include the Rudge Cup which is thought to depict Hadrian’s Wall. However, Roman engineers and surveyors must have been present in relatively large numbers to lay out roads, forts and settlements.
Medieval copies – complete with errors of transcription are what remains and fragments of maps discovered elsewhere in the empire – and of course it’s always good if the aforementioned map is etched on stone as the materials tends to survive better than papyrus or parchment. There’s a fragment of a stone map in marble depicting the suburbs of Rome The Forma Urbis Romae, or Severan Marble Plan of Rome was originally 18 X 13 m when it was carved in the third century and placed in the Temple of Peace on the orders of Septimus Severus. Today it’s a jigsaw of more than 1,000 pieces with most of it missing. What the plan was used for is another matter entirely!
And while we’re on the subject of those military engineers it’s worth recalling that the Vatican hs a copy of a Roman document from the Corpus Agrimensorum which is a set of documents about surveying, some of them even include bird’s eye view maps which give an approximation of the landscape as well as planning for things such as allocation of land to military veterans.
Clearly there were maps and plans and as one of Rome’s 44 or so provinces, Britannia – or at least parts of it- will have been similarly recorded. But aside from the medieval copies historians and archaeologists initially had to rely on reconstructions made by men like William Stukeley in the eighteenth century. His interest in the past led him to create a series of detailed plans and drawings – unfortunately he was not applying modern archeological rigour to his work and so his plans of camps and towns are not always accurate. One of the places he mapped, Little Chester in Derby, or Derventio, still retained a wall above ground level at the time he mapped it. Today York Archeology have used Stukeley’s map – and modern LiDAR to gain a clearer understanding of what the fort once looked like and to decide where an archeological dig might best be located.
Barber, Peter. (ed.) The Map Book
Parker, Philip, History of Britain in Maps