What was here before the fields
Today's fields from the Fields of the World harmonized field data, over an old map on the left and a recent aerial photo on the right. Drag the line between them. Fields where the sea was a century ago, hedges and small plots merged into large blocks, heath and marsh turned into farmland.
Today
Zoom in to see the fields
Examples
Places where the old map tells something about today's fields. Each picture is cut in two like the map: the old map on the left, the aerial photo on the right. Click one to see it there.
About the data
- Fields
- The newest edition of each collection in the Fields of the World harmonized field data, read from its single PMTiles archive. They show from zoom level 12; further out the archive holds only a sample. Collections of field blocks are left out where a country also has its fields.
- Old maps
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Served by the national mapping agencies and archives, as tiles or WMS, and drawn as they come:
- Netherlands: every edition of the topographic maps of the Kadaster since 1815 (Bonnebladen, TOP25, TOP50 and smaller scales), from Topotijdreis by Esri Nederland and the Kadaster, CC BY 4.0. Its tiles are in the Dutch grid and are warped on the fly.
- Flanders: the maps of Fricx (1712) and Ferraris (1777), the Atlas der Buurtwegen (about 1841), the maps of Vandermaelen and the cadastral plans of Popp, and winter aerial photos of 2000–2003, from Digitaal Vlaanderen.
- France: the Cassini map (1756–1789, BnF), the État-major map (1820–1866) and aerial photos of 1950–1965 and 1980–1995, from the IGN Géoplateforme, Licence Ouverte.
- Switzerland: the national maps at the end of every year from 1844 (Dufour, Siegfried, the national map), swisstopo's Journey through time.
- North Rhine-Westphalia: the Prussian Uraufnahme (1836–1850) and Neuaufnahme (1891–1912), and the 1:25,000 map of 1936–1945, from Geobasis NRW, dl-de/zero-2-0.
- Aerial photos
- The newest national aerial photo inside each of these regions (PDOK, Digitaal Vlaanderen, IGN, swisstopo, Geobasis NRW), and Esri World Imagery everywhere else.
- Caveats
- Old maps were drawn by hand and do not line up perfectly with today's surveys: tens of metres off is common on the oldest ones. A field outline on an old map shows where the field is now, not a field of then.
- Built with
- OpenLayers and ol-pmtiles; the maps are read straight from their services. Code on GitHub.