This beautiful county map of Pembrokeshire is one of the earliest printed maps of the county. It was published by Johannes Kip in 1637 to illustrate a new edition of William Camden's Britannia. Unusually, the geography is not derived from the first printed map of Pembrokshire, published by Christopher Saxton in his Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales (1579), the first atlas of British counties. Instead, Kip credits a superior map by George Owen of Henllys, a distinguished Welsh antiquarian, as the source of this map. Owen's map was published in 1602 and first appeared in editions of Camden's Britannia in 1607. This is one of the only maps in Britannia not to be based on Christopher Saxton's county maps.



Kip's map is smaller and lacking in some of the grander decorative elements of the Owen map, but it retains much of the charm associated with early 17th century cartography with large strapwork cartouches, swash lettering, and a stipple sea. These Kip maps remain desirable as they are more commercially available than the much rarer originals upon which they are based.



Coloured. [WCTS1423]