Taxable Timepieces to Sixteenth Century Town Plans
16 February 2011
New documents that shed light on the history of our ancestors – from tax rolls of clock and watch owners in the late eighteenth century to 18,000 maps and town plans dating back to the 1580s – have just gone live online.
They join a treasure trove of historical archives on the ScotlandsPlaces website, which now brings together records from three of Scotland’s National Collections: RCAHMS, the National Archives of Scotland (NAS) and the National Library of Scotland (NLS).
New additions, drawn from the collections of the NLS, include:
- Ordnance Survey 1st edition 6-inch maps from 1843-1882
- County maps of Scotland from 1580-1928, including the work of the most famous Scottish cartographers Timothy Pont, Robert Gordon, and John Adair, and maps from the major Scottish Atlases of the 18th C by Blaeu, Moll and Thomson
- Historical town plans from 1580-1919
- Bathymetric surveys of the freshwater lochs of Scotland from 1897-1909
The NAS have also added rolls of taxes on clocks and watches imposed during the war against France in 1797-8. The rolls name the owners of timepieces subject to tax and cover around two-thirds of Scotland.
Talking about the NLS adding material to the website for the first time, Senior Map Curator Chris Fleet said, “Maps present history in one of its most enthralling forms and the maps which have just gone live on ScotlandsPlaces, collectively offer an unrivalled resource for understanding the history of Scotland’s landscape. ScotlandsPlaces uses the very latest search technology to offer people access to maps including the earliest maps of Scotland by Timothy Pont up to the 20th century.”
Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop said, “Anyone who has ever explored our national archives will undoubtedly have uncovered something remarkable, fascinating or completely unexpected. By providing online access to these documents along with newly digitised historic maps, ScotlandsPlaces brings these rich resources into the digital age and makes them available to new audiences."
