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.
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| 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...
- Go to one of the city links I put on the main map - for example, Edinburgh.
- 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.
- 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.
- You can of course also do this from the clean version of the map.
- 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.
