Little is known about my tiny country in the world and I don't blame you! We are only 2,586.4 km2 (998.6 sq mi) But Luxembourg throughout the history has always played a pivotal part in Yurp (read: Europe). The city of Luxembourg is a jewel. It was founded as Castellum Lucilinburhuc by the romans but it's real history began in AD 963 when the House of Luxembourg came to power. The fortifications where rightfully called the Gibraltar of the North. The London treaties however sealed it's fate. The Duchy of Luxembourg became independent under the condition that the fortress would be dismantled. Funny side note: Although they stripped us from a lot of land in 1839, we were forthwith known as The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
It has always been my wish to have the old fortifications as a layer within Mapinfo, but the only reference to the current city is a paper map where the fortress is superimposed. I digitized it and another ancient map but alas the proportions are somewhat askew with these ancient maps (MI was yet to be invented) so I had to get creative. I have used Photoshop to create the transparency, and I have chopped the map into pieces, where every piece was carefully placed on top of a current aerial image. There are quite a few remnants of the fortifications visible and the government has rebuild and preserved quite a lot as well. Skewing and distorting until it fit. Then I have created one TIFF image with anchor points (since I did not want the aerial image included) so that I could georeference the raster image within MI. I have then saved another version of the image without the anchor points but used the same tab files. It’s so cool that MI actually handles the transparency feature of TIFF.
I am not claiming to be 100% accurate but it's quite close. And as far as I know it’s the first GIS Layer of the prestigious Fortress of Luxembourg.
Also... what it has to do with Summer: I truly hope I got you curious enough to come and visit my beautiful little country. There are 53 other castles waiting for you and an amazing green landscape!
Merci villmools!
Georges