Hanging in Oxford's Bodleian Library, the Gough Map - named after its 19th century owner Richard Gough - is about half a metre high and just over a metre wide.
It was drawn around the year 1360 and there are no other known medieval maps as big or as accurate.
It's made of vellum - now-fragile, very thin animal hide - and the top of the page points east, not north, with the country lying down on its side.
The red and green map marks out more than 600 villages and towns, like London and Oxford, 200 rivers including the Thames and the Humber, and forests, like Sherwood Forest, as well as a very basic if incomplete road network of over 4,700 kilometres.
Nick Millea is the Map Librarian at the Bodleian Library and the publisher of the new book of the map. He says it is completely unique.
"It really is the first map of its kind to show the geography of Britain - there's nothing before it," he said.
"And you can recognise the outline of the British coastline, which from previous maps you can't really - it's very difficult to work out what's going on."
Mr Millea says there are still a lot of mysteries about the Gough Map.
"We know absolutely nothing about who drew it up and why," he said.
"When this map first became available was around about 1360. Perhaps a tiny minority of the population would have known what it was - they could have looked at it - but to think about the concept of a map would have been totally alien."
He says scholars are not even entirely sure what it was used for.
"It could have had an administrative purpose, it could have been used for people to work out their way around the country - it's going to have to be very high-ranking officials working on this," he said.
"It could simply be a statement of empire - a map made for royalty, if you like - saying, 'look, here's what we've got, here's England, here's Wales, and Scotland's next on our hit list'."
It's thought the map was made when Edward III was king. It shows the coast close to France at a time when the King had great success invading French towns.
In fact the depiction of much of the English coast is remarkably accurate, as are areas near Oxford where there had been some technical advances in geography, all done with access to nothing higher than the hills.
But the mystery is why some major roads - clearly well known at the time - were left out of the map.
"I suspect that most of the information about placement of the settlements was done simply by word of mouth," Mr Millea said.
"Someone would have said, 'well the next town from Oxford if you go to the west is Whitney', so I can't imagine that one person or one team of people would have gone out into the landscape."
He says it is likely the map is a compilation of geographic knowledge from many different people.
"I think one of the key things is the great enigma of the Gough Map; these thin red lines," he said.
"In the past it's been assumed that this was a road map, [but] I think in the last four or five years of looking at this, we can say that it's not a road map - I don't think these red lines are roads, because the main roads that were well-known in the 1360s, they're not included.
"The red lines seem to be a cartographic construct, a way of saying that the distance between two places is so many miles, and that you'll see a figure in Roman numerals next to each of these little red lines, so I think it's more an example of sophisticated map-making."
Mr Millea says it is possible the map was drawn up as a means or asserting control over the area.
"One phrase we like to use in cartography is 'the power of maps'," he said.
"[We look at] why was this made made, and what it shows and doesn't show - so many of the real principle roads just aren't there."
You can see an interactive version of the Gough Map at Mapping the Realm.
From: ABC Online
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