Does anyone know why this excellent range of OS maps seems to have been discontinued? I can't find them for sale anywhere, and would like a new copy of the Western Scotland one as my old copy is getting rather tatty.

I can't believe that they stopped selling, as the mix of detail, contour shading and area covered makes them superior to most alternatives. The same scale is still available on-line (here for example), but not on paper.

Are they the ones with the blue covers?

Not economic to continue printing and distributing them, as I understand it.

There's still a motley collection of the Travel series available at various scales - mostly 1:100k though with Scotland at 1:500k. I think some of these are simply the 1:250k cartography enlarged, which makes them look like large print maps for those with bad eyes. Not great.

According to this page the series was discontinued in March 2010. I suppose most people, if they're not glued to a sat-nav will be using an atlas of some description rather than sheet maps. I'd say these larger scale maps have had their days numbered for some time now because of this.

The Travel series that Richard mentioned is just a re-hashed bunch of the Tourist maps - most have been discontinued and the rest are clearly aimed on the tourism hotspots and aren't meant to resemble a coherent series, particularly with the scales all over the place as they are!

In case anyone is interested, I discovered the other day that the three Scottish maps from this series are still being published, by Nicholson Maps. The paper is very shiny (not that sort you can annotate easily ) and the M80 and M74 have been finished (as junctionless blue lines where the OS showed 'under construction').

They are still the same price - £4.99, but as Nicholson are a Scottish company I doubt that the rest of the series are available from them.

I think that it's the green ones that have been discontinued. They have always been my favourite maps. I liked the handy size and the hill-shadow shading: it made mountain areas look more "sinister". I managed to get a some of the last print run - my local village independent book shop still had a few in stock at £4.99 so I cleared them out. Failing that there's always ebay - look at this bargain....

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Ordnance-Survey-Southern-Scotland-and-Northumberland-Road-Map-Book-/200772559682?pt=Non_Fiction&hash=item2ebefa2342#ht_1551wt_948

Will the SABRE Maps budget stretch that far? We clearly have to have it.

Oh wait, we can't put it up for nearly 70 years and we have the 1:250k OS anyway from OpenSpace.

I can understand when someone is willing to pay a fair bit for a rare old OS map (though it's annoying if it doesn't end up on SABRE Maps), but that map, at that price?

It's not just those - the Route series (successors to the Ten Mile Maps available on SABRE Maps, as well as the Route Planning Maps) were binned at the same time.