I'm working on a rather unusual map of Tír Ghlas, my fictional medieval world.
This time, instead of drawing a conventional geographical map, I'm trying to recreate the style of the 13th-century monk and cartographer Matthew Paris, particularly his famous strip maps showing the route from London to Jerusalem.
The idea is to represent the main roads of Tír Ghlas as a medieval traveller might have seen them: a succession of towns, villages, landmarks, and useful information, rather than a geographically accurate representation of the landscape.
The imaginary author of this map is Brother Venanzio, a travelling monk who has taken it upon himself to describe the roads of Tír Ghlas for the benefit of future travellers. He records towns, inns, markets, dangerous places to avoid, and anything else he considers worth mentioning. You can even see himself in the bottom corner, warning travellers about a particularly dangerous forest!
I'm using a mixture of Latin and Irish Gaelic for the place names and annotations, and trying to imitate the lettering and illustrations of medieval manuscripts.
This is still very much a work in progress: I've only completed part of the first strip, and there's a long road ahead!
Everything is hand-drawn, with ink on paper.
