If you are getting out and about in your local area, a fabulous resource for taking a look at Scotland’s past are Slainte Historic maps. These have opened a new window into Scotland’s past to show how the country looked in Victorian times and in the 1940s. Historic maps which show details of streets, buildings, rivers and roads are now available to search free online through a partnership between the National Library of Scotland (NLS) and Wilbourn Associates, a leading firm of chartered environmental surveyors. Another series of thematic maps of Great Britain from 1944-1960 is also being made available.

They allow visitors to the NLS website to view the same place at different times in the past and to see how things have changed over time. They can even be viewed on top of Google satellite and map images to bring everything bang up to date: see the NLS-Wilbourn Associates geo-referenced maps.

Chris Fleet, Senior Map Curator at the National Library of Scotland, said:

‘These new maps cover all of Scotland and are very detailed with a scale of one inch to the mile. People can search for the street their grandparents lived in or see how 19th century farmland has turned into today’s suburbs.

‘We are immensely grateful for the support of Wilbourn Associates which has allowed us to scan and georeference these maps and make them available on the NLS website.’

The Scottish maps were produced in the 1890s and 1940s and the British maps are themed and include features such as administrative areas, farming, geology, iron and steel, land classification and utilisation, population, railways, rainfall, and roads.

There is also lots of useful information for getting out and about for historical inquiry and discovery at the big history project here. A brilliant resource that can be used to design creative learning experiences for Scottish Studies through outdoor learning.