ABSTRACT
The importance of the appearance in Amsterdam in 1654 of Volume 5 of Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Novus, with its forty-nine engraved maps of Scotland and its regions, can hardly be exaggerated.1 This was by any standards a landmark publication. For the first time Scots had to hand a detailed visual representation of their country – its geographical shape and extent and main topographical features – accompanied by verbal descriptions that combined history and geography in a way, known to contemporaries as chorography, that firmly anchored Scotland in time as well as space. The role played by George Buchanan in this project, albeit from well beyond the grave, has not received the recognition it deserves. Yet Buchanan has the unique distinction of being the only Scot, either past or present, to have his birthplace explicitly identified in the Atlas, on the map of Lennox where the Moss on the River Blane near Killearn is described as ‘G. Buchanani patria’.2
