This site is really nice for solving that problem, pop yer Mercator in there and it’s all good!
Bristol really did throw away a commanding lead against Edinburgh in the furthest west stakes didn’t it.
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Gerald of Wales’ map of the British Isles from 1188 shows a surprising decline in accuracy over a thousand years
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It’s actually a bit more accurate in a sense. If you turn it 90 degrees.
‘There’s a big island and there’s a small island and they’re sort of next to each other. No, I have no idea what shape they are’
Got to love an ancient map!
Think you are being a bit harsh on Gerald of Wales (age 6). This is clearly diagramatic. His detailed works reveal a thorough understanding of the geography of these isles:
His other works suggest you may still need to turn the rest of Europe another 90 degrees or so after that (looks like Cologne on the Rhine across the North Sea from North East Scotland):
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I get the feeling Sicily may have been added as an afterthought late on.
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Think they used to draw maps with East at the top, which makes exactly as much sense as drawing them with North at the top. So he’s not actually out by 90 degrees. Why he’s drawn the isles as peas and gherkins though, i have no explanation for.
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Which way should the sun travel over a map
- Right to left
- Top to bottom
- Bottom to top
- Left to right
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Did they do that so that Jerusalem would be at the top of the map?
I think I’ve heard that. There’s no reason North should be at the top though, is there, you just need to pick a direction.
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I mean North is actually roughly at the top of the world as it spins in space though isn’t it? (Or am I being an idiot?)
No, the universe doesn’t have a right way up. You’re probably thinking of all the images you’ve seen of the solar system showing Earth with North at the top, but Earth is depicted like that because there is a convention that North is up - not the other way around. If we’d retained the East is up convention, you’d be used to seeing images of the Earth that look like this
Space photos of Earth are often rotated to show North at the top so it makes more sense to viewers, eg The Blue Marble - Wikipedia
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But in relation to our orbital path around the sun north is at the top (albeit with a tilt) so it makes sense to me to depict it that way if you are showing the solar system.
Again, this is due to the convention that North is at the top. The sun doesn’t have a top and a bottom - there is no right way up for anything except in relation to other objects. So because we have designated Earth’s North to be up, other objects in the universe can be allocated an up or a down in relation to us - but the fact is that we’re all just a bunch of stuff floating in space. If we had kept the East is up convention, we would be depicting the solar system like a bicycle wheel.
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I get your point. I suppose the picture I posted could just as easily be shown rotated by 90 degrees.
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Where do you factor the poles into this equation?
We arbitrarily decided that map orientation should line up with the poles and that the north pole should be at the top. That’s not based on any physical property of the planet or the universe - there’s no reason it makes any more sense to do it that way rather than any other. We could have decided to orient maps based on some other culturally important feature, eg to place one country directly above its rival, or so that a geographical feature points a certain way, or so the sun rises at the bottom, or whatever.
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