Mapping Knoydart

I've been working on a little side-project recently that has arisen from a combination of my work, my origins and my personal interests. Part of my work involves spatial data and mapping in a GIS environment, I'm originally from the Highlands of Scotland and I like to go on holiday to the west Highlands and the islands of Scotland. I also like bad weather. Add to this open source tools (QGIS) and open data (OS VectorMap District) and a remote, rugged peninsula (Knoydart) and you get the following map, which is definitely a work in progress. This blog post explains a little bit more about the development of the map and the different data sources, methods and ideas behind it.

This is the first proper version, but still a rough draft.

The above map is the result of a good few hours work playing around with putting data together in QGIS (and a bit in ArcGIS) - OS tiles NG and NM in case you're asking - merging, dissolving and clipping and whatever else I needed to do to get rid of strange artifacts and multipoint features. I also created a hillshade layer based on the sun position at 12noon on the 12th of April. This means that the mountains of Knoydart are illuminated from the south and that you can really get a sense of what the terrain is like.

A previous version - with greener land

I'm still trying to decide on the look and feel of the final map but here's a few of the things I've done so far...

• I've used inverted shapeburst fills in QGIS to create the blue blur effect around the shoreline. This was a little complicated because I had to merge the foreshore and land layer from the OS data - otherwise some of the blur gets lost behind the foreshore polygon layer.
• I've used Open Sans Condensed text for the labels (with some buffering in white) and different colours for different features. I've used a red font for the spot height layer only.
• The other font I've used is Abel - for the title, description and scale bar.
• For other features I started off symbolising using the Ordnance Survey QGIS stylesheets and then modified them to suit my own tastes - they are really useful. 
• I created larger curved labels for certain features (e.g. 'Sound of Sleat') by following the excellent video tutorial of Klas Karlsson.
• I've exported it at 600dpi and used an A3 size in the Print Composer of QGIS so the resulting full resolution PNG is pretty big - about 30MB. 
• I also added a normal shapeburst fill to the freshwater lochs - as in the image below.

The buffering on the Loch label needs work

Overall, I'm getting closer to something I'm happy with. I like the green colour better in some ways but this gives a slightly misleading impression of Knoydart so I will probably work towards something more like the actual terrain. If you've no idea where this place is, take a look at this article and video, or this trailrunning video.

That's all for now. A somewhat niche interest perhaps but makes a change from me mapping cities, deprivation and commuting and migration flows!

You can find a much higher resolution version of the first image here.

Historic Buildings of Scotland

There are thousands of historic buildings in Scotland, from Edinburgh Castle and Eilean Donan Castle, to Glasgow Cathedral and King's College Chapel in Aberdeen. There is also an open dataset with information on all of Scotland's listed buildings, published by Historic Scotland. In fact, there is even a web map - pastmap.org.uk - which shows all sorts of historic structures and sites. But I wanted to make a web map showing only Scotland's most historic buildings (Category A Listed Buildings). These account for about 8% of Scotland's 48,000 or so Listed Buildings. A screenshot of the new interactive map is shown below.

Go to the full size web map

This is really just a little experiment in my spare time - partly done out of curiosity and partly because I use these tools when I am teaching GIS at the University of Sheffield. And also because I'm Scottish and like old buildings. I made the map in CartoDB and I used some of the annotation and web link tools to make it a little more useful. I added a little bit of information, some links to Scottish cities on the right of the map interface and also a few labels of particular points of interest. If you click on a point on the map you'll see more information on that building, including a web link to the Historic Scotland information page for it and the date it was listed, as shown below.

The map works pretty well and will look good in most web browsers but if the screen is not very big or viewed at a high resolution you may find that labels overlap a bit. Because of this I also created a clean version of the map with only minimal labels. Also, if you want the map centred and zoomed to a specific location of your own choosing, this can be done quite easily, as follows...

1. Go to one of the city links I put on the main map - for example, Edinburgh.
2. Look at the web address (as in the image below) and you'll see latitude and longitude coordinates plus a zoom value. These can be customised and then the new link shared as you wish.
3. To get any lat/long values for anywhere, the simplest way is to go to Google maps, search for a location and then copy the lat/long values from the url.
4. You can of course also do this from the clean version of the map.
5. Share and embed as you wish, via the little icon to the top right of the map.

That's about all there is to say about it. Hope you find it informative and useful. Let me know if you spot any glaring errors.