The Guardian view on reading maps: so much more than navigation

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/03/guardian-view-on-reading-maps

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Maps were the original data visualisation tool, a way of transferring the dimensions of the physical world on to parchment or paper that could be used by anyone who had learned the language of maps and admired even by those who had not. In the words of John Noble Wilford in his history The Mapmakers, maps “embody a perspective of that which is known and a perception of that which may be worth knowing”. At their best, they are works of art, a creative mix of science and culture.

Unhappily, according to the Royal Institute of Navigation, which was set up in 1947 in recognition of the contribution to winning the war that had been made by soldiers who knew where they were, the convenience of the satnav is threatening the ancient skills of mapping. In a report timed for this May bank holiday weekend, when anyone in possession of waterproofs and a pair of walking boots has headed for the open country, reliance on GPS technology is fast eroding the skills that you need when your phone battery dies only half way across the moor. As with using a watch or memorising facts, members of the millennial generation have no need to know how to use a compass or to learn the different symbols on an Ordnance Survey map that allow users to distinguish between a coniferous and a deciduous wood, or a weir and a footbridge – because their Garmin or their iPhone will look after them anyway.

For as far back as records go, it has been a powerful human instinct to try to describe the relationship between the physical world up to and beyond the horizon, and the world visualised in the imagination. Maps may have been among the earliest form of written communication. Sometimes it was an attempt to apply mathematical understanding to create a truly scientific account of the world. Sometimes a map was intended to order it according to ecclesiastical priorities, like the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral. Copies of maps allegedly made by Marco Polo of the coast of Alaska have surfaced in the US. Maps became the tool of merchants and administrators. In some places the cartographers represented a kind of cultural oppression, a phenomenon captured by Brian Friel in his play about mapmaking in 19th-century Ireland, Translations, where the villages and mountains are robbed of their Gaelic identity in a brutal outburst of Anglicisation by a detachment of soldiers. The Ordnance Survey maps that most walkers still use are direct descendants of the maps drawn up in the great expansion of cartography ordered to assess the state of Britain’s coastal fortifications against the French in the Napoleonic wars, and later the maps on which the great engineers sketched their plans for canals and railways.

To lose a familiarity with these maps would be like giving up learning a second language. Being able to look at a map and turn the contour lines and the symbols into the lie of the land, to see the march of pylons and the wooded hilltop and to be able to work out how to reach the nearest village with a pub: this is both a practical skill and a voyage of the imagination.