The Map that Came to Life I took to maps instinctively as a child, needing little encouragement apart from there actually being a few decent maps in the house to get me going, as I recalled in my previous post. Some children (the Resident Wise Woman included) found another introduction to maps in a wonderful book, H. J. Deverson and Ronald Lampitt’s The Map That Came to Life. As a further commemoration of National Map-Reading Week, here’s what I wrote about this book back in 2008, when this blog itself was in its infancy:
On one of our recent visits to a local secondhand bookshop, my wife came across a copy of The Map That Came to Life, a book she had read avidly when she was a child. Written by H. J. Deverson and illustrated by Ronald Lampitt, The Map That Came to Life was first published in 1948, and was much reprinted. It describes how two children (and a dog) go on a walk across the English countryside with an Ordnance Survey map to guide them. Much of what they find on the way is marked on the map, whose symbols for roads, railways, telephone boxes, tumuli, and so on and on, turn to reality along the way. The reader, meanwhile, learns how to read a map, and how maps have much to teach us about the world around us.
In some ways the world of The Map That Came to Life does not exist today. These two children set off on a walk across unfamiliar country with only their map for guidance. They talk to strangers – who give them fascinating nuggets of local information rather than luring them into dark corners. Their dog spends most of its time off its lead, rivers and lakes hold no terrors for them, and, of course, this being 1948, they are not much troubled by traffic.
It’s different in other ways too. The villages through which they pass are well provided with the kind of facilities – shops, pubs, Post Offices, a forge – that we mourn the passing of today. Interesting antiquities, such as a ruined abbey and a castle, abound, giving me an excuse for including the book in a blog about English Buildings. If truth be told, all these ancient and modern details are probably rather thick on the ground even for 1948, because their purpose after all is to show us as many map symbols coming to life as can be reasonably encompassed in 32 pages.
And not just the symbols, but what’s behind them. Joanna and John learn about ruined buildings, tumuli, tithe barns, and ancient churches. They listen to bird song and discover what kinds of trees grow beside rivers. They find out the relationship between contours and man-made features like railway lines and viaducts. And by helping to alert some farm workers to a fire in a wood, they learn about one potential danger in the countryside.
Sadly, this book would not be published today. For one thing, it’s very specifically British in its content, and publishers nowadays cry out for books that will work in an international market. For another, it’s not an outwardly exciting book – its information about the past contains no pillaging Vikings, no bombs, none of the opportunistic stink and goo of ‘Horrible History’. Yet in its quiet way it conveys a different kind of excitement – the excitement of finding things out, of being inquisitive about the environment, of thinking about what you see. And that is one of the best kinds of excitement there is.
In 2008 that post garnered quite a few comments and emails: maybe 11 years on it will still strike a few more chords. I might have added that OS maps are still going strong, and still present (on paper and on screen) a superior form of mapping that, in my opinion, conveys more information than any other. For the architectural enthusiast and historian, they include such a lot, from churches (their symbols indicating whether they have a tower or spire or neither) to Roman villas, from tumuli to manor houses. Much of this information just isn’t on other maps. True, it’s all there on satellite view or Google Earth, but often not identified, so it can be hard to know what you’re looking at. And today, more than 70 years after The Map That Came to Life was published, there are new layers of more recent history – things identified as ‘Airfield (disused)’ and ‘dismtd rly’, for the curious to investigate. Such a map is a world.
No comments:
Post a Comment