Taras Kaduk produced a beautiful street map here and I decided to try it, but for Inverness.

Initially I followed his code very faithfully, and produced a nice plot, but upon uploading the image to GitHub, and seeing it rendered against a dark background, I decided to try another version with {ggdark}.

These are quite large images, so I am just going to show snippets of them here.

Version 1 – Nice!

Then I saw some images showing the Ness River area at night, which is enhanced by lots of coloured lights under bridges and along the river banks.

So I played around with some colours – yellow-ish for the railway line, deep pink for streets, and a teal colour for major roads. I think it looks OK, you may disagree :

Finally, I realised I was missing something quite major – the Caledonian Canal, which runs through the city to Loch Ness and beyond. Following a link from Taras’s blog, I found myself quickly grasping what needed to be done – I also added some bays, but left them out of the final plot. This one looks a but disjointed because the Canal is so long (Loch Ness is 23 miles long, for some perspective) but I think the plot is OK. I should maybe have picked out a more exciting colour than ‘blue’ for the canal, but it cuts through the loch and other waterways quite well.

Remember these are just screen shots of parts of the full images, so you might like to take a look at the final plots.

Code here if you’re interested

Thank you again to Taras for the original code, and for keeping it up to date otherwise this would not have been possible.