From London to the Holy Land

I just love maps.  There are some maps being featured right now on the British Museum's Medieval Manuscripts Blog. Here's one from the 1250's of a pilgrimage travel route. All the towns are about one day's travel apart.

Royal MS 14 C VII

Each town is distilled to its essential features, and each road is straight. It is more of a topological map than a topographical map, if you get my mathematical pun.  It's a really telling example of how medieval people organized, prioritized, and represented information artistically, whether geography or scripture was the subject.

If you'd like to zoom in on it and view other pages, you can find the digitized manuscript online at the British Museum website: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_14_c_vii_f002r