Map Scanning Project Update

30 August 2026

Over the last two weeks of August, our incredible team of 22 volunteers, led by the amazing Claire Boardman, worked together to catalogue and scan historical maps and plans as part of the ‘Highland Maps and Plans’ project, including both original maps and annotated copies, with the earliest dating back to the 1700s. Together, we’re incredibly proud to announce that we have scanned over 900 maps, producing 1,153 digital images! A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to making the project such a success, to Bruce and Dorothy Field and to Historic Environment Scotland who helped fund the project and especially to the estates, museums and archive centres who generously loaned their maps and plans for us to digitise. But the project doesn’t end here! Looking ahead, we’ll be working with the estates, museums and archive centres to return the digital images, while a copy of the imagery and accompanying data will also be passed to the National Library of Scotland for online publication, helping to make this fascinating material accessible to everyone. For those interested in learning more about the project and the imagery we’ve uncovered, there will be a presentation at the Highland Archaeology Conference on Saturday afternoon, 10th October. What a fantastic end to 10 days of maps, history, teamwork and plenty of scanning, we can’t wait to see where this project goes next!