Ruthenia, around Ungvar

Coming up on the corner of the much earlier map, whereupon I'll be mapping eastward directly into the heart of the Ukraine.  I won't be heading south again until reaching a corner of the Dneiper river south of Kiyev.

Anyway, with the turn, I don't want the reader to get confused as to where we are, so here's a map from Google Earth showing what's been mapped so far and what I'm going to map next ... and in which order.

Google Earth lets me save all the sections I've mapped (up to a point, the memory starts to go and at that point I delete the oldest ones.  The red rectangles, or sections, are done.  We'll be moving into the blue ones.  In fact, the first blue one here is done, I did it today and it's posted below.  I'll be following the arrows until I get to the top of the pyramid.  Then I'll start going east, working from south to north with each three blocks.

As you can see, we're going to get into a lot of mountains ... and these will last a while, until we get out onto the Ukrainian plain, whereupon we won't see another significant mountain at least until we get to the Crimea.  Assuming I don't pass the mountains of Yalta as we go by.  But that's all for another day, probably about two to three months from now, going by this pace.  We might actually get back to this corner six months from now ... heh heh.

I failed to screenshot the next section before doing it, but there's a decent indication of it from the previous post.  Here it is completed, without background:

The above was a bit of a bitch.  The first rule of mountains, they are not empty.  ALL fantasy maps insist that mountains should be depicted as seas of peaks, without exception, despite how many Americans live in and around the Rocky Mountains and other ranges.  These places are not empty.  Cultures squeezed into narrow valleys between mountains go back 5,000 years ... and many of these were highly developed by the 1st millennium BCE.  There's plenty of room for a culture to farm and live in a valley just a mile wide ... so pack those people in.  Remember that the soil on a valley floor is often richer than that of an open plain.

Doing sections in the mountains is slow business.  The above took me 90 minutes.