Episode list

Nicholas Crane travels across wild Highland landscapes using William Roy's pioneering military map of 18th-century Scotland.

Nicholas Crane travels across eight maps that changed the face of Britain. He uses a 1675 road map to traverse the trans-Pennine pass from York to Lancaster.

It is an icon of London, a design classic printed on everything from t-shirts to baseball caps, but the Underground Map started with one man working in his bedroom. Harry Beck was an electrical engineer. In 1931 he realized that his circuit diagrams were a perfect model for a new map of the underground network. Nicholas Crane travels the tube to discover how he did it. Why did he exclude everything at street level and what dictated his choice of color for each line?

The most original and accurate map of Britain. It was in use for over 200 years.

Before the late 1700s no sailor could fix his exact position on open sea, so ships sailed close to land, which gave them landmarks to recognize, but also increased their risk of shipwreck. Greenville Collins's charts of the British coastline, published in 1693, saved hundreds of ships and lives. Nicholas Crane takes a journey on a square-rigger of the period to try and re-discover what Collins did. He uses Collins's revolutionary coasting pilot to navigate safely round the treacherous Cornish coastline, sailing into a harbor and finding his way across dangerous open sea to Eddystone Rock.

Modern explorer Nicholas Crane deciphers William Smith's extraordinary underground map of 1815, on an arduous geological journey that explores why it's much more than simply a cartographic masterpiece. No-one thought rocks were that important until they studied Smith's revolutionary, multi-colored geological map of Britain. Years before Darwin, Smith overturned all the existing ideas about mineral prospecting, fossils and the origins of the earth. He demonstrated that the world was far, far older than people had thought. Nicholas Crane investigates how Smith arrived at his ideas, how he discovered that coal is always found in the company of particular fossils, and that layers of different rock confirm that creation was not one event but a multi-million year process.

Can modern explorer Nicholas Crane use Christopher Saxton's exquisite map of Norfolk to lead him safely through some of the wildest waterland landscapes of today? In just five summers, Saxton produced the first national atlas, providing Elizabethans with 34 beautifully engraved, hand-colored county maps. But maps are created for all sorts of reasons and as he motorbikes across Norfolk, Saxton's first map, Nick discovers that Saxton's survey was as much about identifying possible political trouble spots as rivers and windmills. Nick comes up with fascinating evidence that Norfolk was the heartland of Catholic conspiracy-making in the late 1500s. He also tries to solve the puzzle of Saxton's amazing omission of the Norfolk Broads.

Modern explorer Nicholas Crane travels across eight maps that changed the face of Britain in a series of geographical challenges. He uses a modern OS map to lead him safely through some of the wildest Highland landscapes, exploring the methods of the original surveyors back in the 1930s. He discovers how hard they worked, struggling up mountains with heavy surveying equipment, and attempts his own triangulation survey at night.