Thirty years on, I find it faintly odd that I have far clearer memories of the way the map looked than practically any other part of those glorious days out, rambling purposelessly but fired with adventure. Even if I only go back twenty years, there’s a bit of a theme emerging: a month’s Inter Railing with a college mate has almost all been excised from my memory save for total recall of the Thomas Cook Rail Map of Europe circa 1988. A decade further yet, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that I moved to mid Wales in part response to a map I’d been given as a present a year or two earlier, of The Railways, Telegraphs, &c of Great Britain Engraved Expressly For The A. B. C. Railway Guide from 1859. Black threads squirm their way across the country in lavish loops and race-for-the-line competition. Around London, Manchester and the coal seams of south Wales and Yorkshire, the knot of rails threatens to choke the living daylight out of the cities and towns. It’s called a map of Great Britain, but Scotland is sliced off at Aberdeen, so that the one patch of virgin purity, unblemished by angry lines, is the interior of Wales. There’s not one track between Brecon and the Nantlle quarries at Snowdon, nothing west of Oswestry or Leominster. A dotted line of vague intent ambles to Llanidloes, but that’s it. The gaping maw on the map pulled me in as I stared at it above my desk, and way before I really knew why, I had upped sticks to the sticks, a tiny mountain village on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park. It was either that map or a delayed reaction to Ivor the Engine.
My obsession with maps has even given me a strange sort of career. After leaving university, I lasted less than two years in proper jobs, before the urge to take to the open road, with an Ordnance Survey took hold and launched me as a travel writer, producing guide books to the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Greater Glasgow and Bristol/Bath, and then into the stable of Rough Guide authors. My main work for them was as co-author of the brand new Wales book, though I also wrote various chapters of the early editions of the books on Scotland and England. Most people, on discovering that I was a travel writer, would look insanely jealous, up to the point where I told them that I was writing about Barmouth and Birmingham, rather than Bermuda and Barbados. ‘Couldn’t you get anywhere decent?’ was the stock response. But for me, it was the dream job, and remains so to this day: I love travelling abroad, but, as a writer, have only ever wanted to specialise in the amazingly diverse landscapes and culture of our own islands. Helped, of course, by the maps: my devotion to British mapping, the Ordnance Survey in particular, is so unyielding that exposure to foreign maps leaves me feeling disoriented and slightly perturbed by their inexactitude, harsh colours and inappropriate symbols.
For six years now, I’ve been writing and presenting offbeat travelogues for Welsh television that have allowed me to be as pedantic, opinionated and map-obsessed as I like. Gratifyingly, it’s been the more finicky features on maps, their nomenclature, borders and often strange history that have culled the biggest reaction and audience figures. And not just from gentlemen with fussy little moustaches, either (although there have been a fair few of them, truth be told). There’s a lot of us out there, moustachioed or otherwise.
Maps not only show the world, they lubricate its easy movement. On an average day, we will consult them a dozen times, often almost unconsciously: checking the A-Z, the road atlas or the satnav, scanning the tube or bus map, doing a quick Google online, flying over a virtual Earth, navigating around some retail behemoth on the hunt for a branch of Boots, watching the weather forecast, planning a walk or a trip, visiting a theme park or stately home, conference centre or industrial estate, catching up on the news, booking a holiday or hotel. Maps pepper books, brochures, advertisements, web pages and newspaper and magazine articles: we barely notice them because they do their job so well. They represent practically every area of human existence, conveying, at a stroke, precise information, not just about layout and topography, but history, politics, priorities, attitudes and power. They are the unsung heroes of life, and I want to sing their song.
Malcolm Saville’s frontispiece map for Wings Over Witchend
‘Very well,’ said Uncle George. ‘But before you set out we must discover if you can really find your way by the map. You can have a great deal of fun from a map, you know,’ he added. ‘Especially when it comes to life!’
Joanna seemed quite startled to hear this.
˜ H. J. Deverson and Ronald Lampitt, The Map that Came to Life (children’s book from 1948)
Not for us British the wilderness, the outback or the week-long journey on the wide open road. Although folk have gamely tried it, there’s not much of a heroic tale to be told or heart-wrenching ballad to be wrung out of getting your kicks on the A66. The American or Australian relationship with their landscape is a world away from ours. They grab their beers and their buddies, before heading out into the gaping yonder for adventurous rites of passage, laced with deadly wildlife and treacherous topography, under skies that scorch the red earth by day and, by night, fill with fire-sparks twirling lazily into a canopy of stars. How many books, movies, TV series and songs have we all sat through that have ploughed that well-worn furrow? And what’s our equivalent? We go for a nice drive or a bit of a walk on a Sunday afternoon, through a landscape as tame as a tortoise, perhaps take in a stately home or a mouldering ruin, a country pub if we’re feeling rakish. If we really want to push ourselves to the limits of desolation, we might pop on our walking boots, pack some sandwiches and a thermos, and tackle ten miles, and a bit of a stiff climb, in the Peak District or the Lakes—sometimes going so far off the beaten track that we could be as much as an hour from the nearest cream tea. A landscape that has been so thoroughly explored, so comprehensively mapped and so exhaustively written about just isn’t going to throw up any life-threatening challenges. This is not Marlboro Country; it’s Lambert & Butler Land. And that’s exactly how we like it.
The map, spread lovingly over our knees, is the key to unlocking our interaction with what we nobly like to think of as our Great Outdoors. We set out, secure in the certainty that we are using the finest maps in the world: an index of all things possible, albeit all things measured, calibrated and recorded in painstaking detail. There may be no beasts to grapple with and precious little wilderness to explore, but we are quite happy to take our pleasures in far less sensational, less melodramatic ways. Nothing compares with the joy of setting off, not quite knowing where you’re heading, with just a map and a faintly heady sense of adventure to guide you. Sometimes, a nearby name, a shape or a symbol will leap off your Ordnance Survey and demand closer inspection.
On those lovely long childhood explorations in my grandparents’ Ford Corsair, where I’d be sat in the back precociously barking out navigation orders from behind a map, I can still recall the frisson of excitement that coursed through me on spotting, just outside the Warwickshire village of Long Itchington, a thrilling label on the OS: Model Village. These worlds-in-miniature,