For cartophile Daniel Neilson, maps are more than navigation tools. They are stories waiting to be read — of history, language and landscape — and hold the promise of adventure across England and Wales.
Maps tell stories. They tell the story of their landscapes: the steepening contours show the aspect of a hill, mountains or a cliff. The green wooded areas tell of a copse or woodland. Roads and pathways, railway lines and buildings, rivers, lakes and reservoirs. All these stories are depicted in symbols, ones we’ve become accustomed to over the years of poring over them. If you’re a walker or cyclist, you’ll know that on an Ordnance Survey 1:25 000 scale Explorer maps, longer dashes mean a bridleway, whereas shorter dashes are a footpath… no bikes here, oh no. We know that a black square with a cross is a ‘place of worship’ with a tower, and that a black circle with a cross is a place of worship with a spire, minaret, or dome. That FB means ‘footpath’ and PH stands for public house (you definitely knew that one) and, of course, that a pinky triangle signifies youth hostel.
Sometimes you come across a fancy typeface: Castle, Cairns, Tumulus, Motte, Field System. That’s something old, something interesting. We’re now moving on from signifying geographic features and into symbolising history. Battle sites have crossed swords as a symbol, and often the date of the battle. That level of detail on a walking map has always blown my mind. You can read a map like you can read a book, and that’s before we get onto the names themselves. Once you’ve had your fun with amusingly named villages and locations (Cocking, Winding Bottom, Crapham Down), the intrigue deepens. A glance at a couple of squares in the North York Moors, chosen at random, reveals the evocative names of Thunderheads, Bitchagreen, Bee Stone Farm, and Duck Ho. I want to go there! Which leads to the next level of reading maps. We’ve read the stories of the past, but for walkers, cyclists, runners, mountaineers, and anyone who loves the outdoors, they also offer the prospect of adventure. Maps are loaded with potential.
As Nick Giles OBE, OS Maps Managing Director, says: “Maps have always been more than just tools for navigation. Not only do they look beautiful and intriguing when hung on a wall, but they are also gateways to adventure, discovery, and connection with the world around us. Whether you’re using a paper map or a digital one, there is such joy in exploring new places and understanding your surroundings.”
Mapping history
For mapmakers and cartophiles, perhaps the most important symbol on the map is a blue triangle with a small blue dot at its centre. Yep, a trig pillar, a triangulation pillar. Today, these are useful navigation points, but their existence greatly improved the accuracy of Ordnance Survey maps.
The name probably gives it away, but the Ordnance Survey was first developed to map the country in intricate detail for military purposes. The Scottish Highlands required some understanding after the 1745 rebellion, and the military was also watching the French Revolution unfold with concern that it could spread across the British Isles. The Defence Ministry, then known as the Board of Ordnance, began to survey the coast of England. Earlier maps, while recognisable, didn’t offer enough detail for troop movements, and certainly didn’t show the location of the nearest viewpoint. In 1747, 21-year-old William Roy embarked on a mission to map the roads, hills, rivers and land cover of Scotland for the ‘Great Map’. Using 50-foot chains and surveying compasses, a party of eight spent eight years creating the most accurate map ever made.
The words ‘Ordnance Survey’, however, weren’t introduced until 1801, and the first OS map proper was of Kent, published the same year. By now, triangulation meant distances were accurate, and the maps were incredibly detailed and beautifully coloured. In the 1900s, with the advent of photography, tools expanded, and with them came greater accuracy. In 1935, it was decided that the entire country needed to be remapped with inch-by-inch accuracy, and the Retriangulation of Great Britain began. It was during this period that the task of constructing concrete triangulation pillars on hills and mountains across Britain began. Around 6,500 were built, many of them, by necessity, located in some of the most inhospitable places in the country. The work wasn’t finished until 1962, by which time the computer age was more than just a murmur. Digital mapping was introduced in 1973, and by 1990, with GPS technology, the trig pillars were largely redundant, other than providing somewhere for a certain kind of hiker to stuff an empty packet of Quavers at the top. Today, OS is a big data player globally. One of the core roles of OS is to maintain the National Geographic Database (NGD) for Great Britain. This database contains over half a billion geographic features and is updated over 20,000 times a day.
The naming of things
However accurate GPS and aerial surveying are, they can’t help with one of the ongoing challenges of mapping the United Kingdom: the naming of places. Many of these names are now long-established, but there have been accusations of Anglicisation, particularly in Welsh and Gaelic-speaking areas. There is no single authority for place names, and Ordnance Survey cannot decide by itself to change a name, but are instructed to change names by authoritative bodies in England and Wales.
A spokesperson for Ordnance Survey says: “Accurate representation of place names, including bilingual names if they are both in use, is essential for delivering high-quality mapping products to the public and supporting government and emergency services. Any rare changes we do make are usually as a result of changes made by either authoritative bodies or when a name falls into disuse and another name comes into use.
“We continue to see an increase in the number of Welsh names, and have supported recent work to adopt a number of standardised Welsh place names for lakes within Eryri National Park, ensuring they are captured in our database.”
For example, the Lake District mountain Blencathra is also officially known as Saddleback, as shown on the OS map. Among hillwalkers and those who love the outdoors, it’s one of those perennial conversation points. So maps inspire conversation too. But are maps still in widespread use?
A recent survey by Ordnance Survey found that 84% of respondents could read a map well, 52% believed maps were vital, and 43% owned one or two maps at home. (I can’t for the life of me imagine what the other 57% fill their loft with.) At the same time, Ordnance Survey also went in search of Britain’s biggest map lover, so perhaps it’s best to leave our ode to maps with these words from the winner, Nigel Brown: “My interest in paper maps began on Good Friday 1964 when myself, my brother, and my best friend, armed with OS Sheet SE 22 1:25 000 borrowed from the local library, went searching for Haigh Well about two miles from our home. With the aid of the map we found the old well. We were ecstatic, and I became hooked on maps.”
There’s always a story in a map, and a map always makes stories.
Find free map reading resources at getoutside.ordnancesurvey.co.uk
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