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THIS OBJECT IS PART OF THE PROJECT 'A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 100 OBJECTS'.

LANHYDROCK HOUSE. Joel Gascoyne, the maker of this map, was one of the first to accurately map Cornwall. The atlas is a very personal document with vignettes of milk maids and miners and fashionable flowers like tulips which local gentry families might have planted in their gardens. Geographic features and land use is shown by different colours and symbols - something not done again until the tithe maps of the late 1830s to 1840s.

As well as making a county map he surveyed the Cornish lands of the Robartes family of Lanhydrock and the Grenviles of Stowe in Kilkhampton. Covering just over half of all Cornish parishes, the Lanhydrock atlas shows how widely distributed the lands of a relatively new Cornish gentry family were. The Robartes first come to notice as tin merchants in Truro but soon rose to prominence at the end of the sixteenth-century through dubious money-lending and land acquisition activities.