Styling Contour Lines

This contour map of Schiehallion Mountain shows the location in Scotland where Charles Hutton invented contour lines as part of an experiment to work out the density of the Earth. In order to determine the density of the mountain the Schiehallion Experiment needed to accurately survey the mountain. During this survey Hutton hit upon the idea of using a series of lines at set intervals to show points of equal height.

My contour map of Schiehallion Mountain was made using axismaps new Contours map tool. Contours is a fun new tool for making a contour map of any location in the world, style the map and export it in a number of different formats.


A huge amount of fun can be had playing with the styling tools in Contours. Using these tools you can color and weight the mapped contour lines, adjust the line intervals and color or hypsometric tint the background fill. All of these changes to the styles of your mapped contours take place within the map browser.

You can read more about the new Contours tool on the axismaps blog.