Cartography · Studio

River Catchments of Scotland

Map titled: 'River Catchments of Scotland'. Distance from catchment boundary is shown as hillshaded topography and coloured using a blue-to-white colourmap. Large catchments, such as the Tweed in the Scottish Borders, Tay in Perth and Kinross, and the Spey all appear as large depressions in the landscape with their catchment boundaries appearing as ridges. The sea is depicted with a random scattering of blue-to-white dots. Credits in the bottom left corner read: 'by:tlohde / OpenStreetMap contributors / includes Crown copyright, Cefas 2023 / League Script by the League of Moveable Type'
River Catchments of Scotland: Remolding Scotland by depicting river catchments as terrain. Made for day 20 of the 2025 #30DayMapChallenge : water
projectionOSGB
toolsPython: matplotlib, cartopy, xarray, geopandas, shapely and scipy for the KDTree
dataCatchment Boundaries for Soctland based on Scottish Environment Protection Agency catcments (includes Crown copyright, Cefas 2023), Coastline from OpenStreetMap
fontLeague Script by the League of Moveable Type
commentsDistances to catchment boundary were created across a 0.5 km grid. A hillshade was then applied to the resulting proximity surface. Merging some of the smaller catchments would probably aid legibility here. Better still, find the North Sea / Atlantic water shed and get distance from that boundary, and hillshade the proximity to that.
date20/11/2025