How to use the DEFRA MAGIC Map England

Submitted by Andy B on Friday, 31 December 2004 Page Views: 28851

Country: England There is a wealth of archaeological site reports from English Heritage live on the web. Unfortunately a lot of these are buried in the otherwise excellent, if tricky to use, Magic Map. So I thought I'd write a quick guide to how to get to these nuggets. This is what you do.

First, click on the grey square [i] icon from the row of icons on any of our Megalith Map site pages. This will link you to the DEFRA Magic Map in a new window. This drops you into the Scheduled Monuments view, you will see any of these in orange. MAGIC are currently adding data showing the actual boundaries of many scheduled monuments, others are just shown as dots. There are lots of other layers you can select if you want to.

First you might need to zoom in a bit, so click on the (+) Magnifier at bottom left to select Zoom Mode and click on the middle of the map.

To see the writeups, click on the round (i) icon at top left. Then click on an orange dot or region. This will give you a pop-up window with the name of the site and a link to the original English Heritage Site and Monument record in PDF format. This will pop up in a new window if you click on the link.

Once you've got this link up it would be good if you could copy the direct link to this PDF file in a Megalithic Portal comment so other people can link straight to it from our pages.

I've noticed contributors to 'free for all' web sites copying wholesale from these English Heritage writeups. This is not a good idea as 1) they are copyright, 2) English Heritage might update the original and you get left with out of date information, 3) why copy when you can link - use the power of the web.

So instead of copying data from English Heritage, please give the direct link to the PDF file. Have a play with the features on the MAGIC map, it really is an amazing free resource.

You can of course just use it as a map, indeed they have a print option so you can take a copy with you. This is the highest resolution mapping of England available on the web so it's a good plan to take these printouts with you on a site visits, especially if you don't have a GPS receiver.

Contributor Bio for Andy B: Megalithic Portal Founding Editor.

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