Old Series The Cassini Old Series maps are ideal for anyone with an interest in the past. For local historians, they offer a consistent and accurate overview of your part of the country. For genealogists, they describe the landscape that your ancestors inhabited, as well as providing valuable research information about place names. Whatever your level of interest, these maps will take you on a fascinating journey back in time. Because we’re enlarged the Old Series maps so they match the present-day OS Landrangers, it’s easy to make direct comparisons between then and now, letting you discover what has changed and what has not. Numerous features of the past still surround us, waiting to be re-discovered. These maps help point out the way. |
These maps were the result of the first ever national survey of England & Wales. From the late 1790s until 1874, a small army of surveyors covered every corner of the what was still an almost entirely rural country. Their work provided a stunning portrait of the landscape, with every farm, track, copse and hamlet recorded. Many of these features would have been unchanged for centuries, reminders of ancient patterns of settlement dating back to Saxon times. The maps elegantly capture the age of the canal, the coaching inn and the horse-drawn cart: the final decades of an agrarian society that was soon to be over-run by new transport links, rapid population growth and urban expansion.