This is a sporting map of the county of Oxfordshire and surrounding parts of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Warwickshire, showing the meeting places of the foxhounds from Hobson’s Fox-Hunting Atlas published by Longman, Rees, Orme & Co, London c1871. Cartographically, the map is essentially a lithographic copy of the steel engraved map the Walker’s published in the 1830s and 1840s in editions of their British Atlas. In place of the original county and parliamentary boundaries, this map divides the county into the borders of the various Hunts. Banbury and the northern tip of the county are included in the Warwickshire Hunt, most of West Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds make up the Heythrop Hunt. A Mr Drake was listed as the master of the Bicester and Brackley hunt and a Mr Philips for South Oxfordshire, and the Vale of the White Horse is its own entity, apart from the Old Berkshire hunt. Actual locations for the meets within each region are marked by blue circles. The map also retains details of the Hundreds, parliamentary divisions, railways, and demographic information from the original Walker map.
John Walker (1813-1873), Alexander Walker and Charles Walker (1799-1872), and the sons of the engraver and Admiralty hydrographer, John Walker (fl. 1783-1831) were collectively known as J & C Walker. They were engravers, draughtsmen and publishers working through the 19th Century. The company was extremely active between 1820 and 1895. John, the better known of the three brothers, was a founding member of the Royal Geographical Society.
J & C Walker had several offices 47 Bernard St Russel Sq (1830-1836), 3 Burleigh St Strand (1837-1840), 9 Castle Street, Holborn (1841-1847), and 37 Castle St Holborn (1848-1875). The firm is best known for its work in conjunction with the maps issued by the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge (S.D.U.K). However, they also engraved a large corpus of work for the British Admiralty, as well as issuing several important maps of India and multiple issues of the Royal Atlas
