Country Life - National Map Centre

http://www.countrylife.co.uk/blogs/spectator

I shared Carla Carlisle’s shock when I learned, during a visit there last week to purchase an essential rain-proof street map of Edinburgh, that the National Map Centre was to close (Spectator, ‘Map-reading by heart’ August 24).

Every journey may begin with a single step, but prior to that the wise traveller would make a quick trip to the National Map Centre. It is here that one finds not just guide-books and globes and maps and memoirs, but a sense of adventure.

A good book shop is not stocked, it is curated. It is a pleasure to spend time there browsing and one frequently leaves not just with one’s intended purchase, but other discoveries as well. Such a store is the National Map Centre.

The National Map Centre sells not just OS maps, guides and travel writing, but huge wall-sized world maps, ideal for plotting foreign trips or world domination. These fascinate because many do not always place Great Britain in the centre of the map. The different projections of the world challenge traditional views and present a different way of looking at things. Yet this does not diminish our importance, a map is a way of finding your way home, and home is always the most important place in the world.

The National Map Centre is important also. The adventurers great and small that have started there must be countless. When it closes, the world will be a slightly darker, duller place, and that much harder to navigate.

Postscript from Ireland - maps

A map has three lives. Actually, to be more accurate, there are three ages to the life of a map. At least.

The first age is before the journey – the planning stages. Now, you can talk about a journey as much as you like, either to your mates down the pub or speculatively with your significant other whom you’re trying to entice away for a week of naughtiness under canvas but, once you’ve invested in a map, that’s commitment. Is there anything more exciting than a map spread across a table? It may be the family dining table, with a map of the holiday spread out and the excited family gathered at the edges. Even more excitingly, it may be over a pub table with a group of mates who were sceptical about the prospect of a cycling tour but, through the simple application of several pints of lager and a map clearly showing just how many public houses there are along the route, are now straining at the break blocks to get underway.

Pub tables are simply more exciting because ideas generated by alcohol and sustained by alcohol are such fun. Oddly, from places of relaxation where the diet is based around beer, pork scratchings and corn based snacks, many athletic holidays are planned – cycling round Ireland, walking the Pennine Way, mountaineering in Spain. All sound possible through the simple addition of beer.

It all connects us to that time in the past when heroic men, probably buoyed up by an explosive mixture of brandy, cigars and rampant imperialism, spread a map, largely blank in the middle, across the billiards table of their club and decided to see what was at the centre of that blank space. With luck, that large blank space contained a large mineral deposit and some gullible natives who didn’t realise the true value of a copper mine. Possibly even a mountain that one could name after an aunt, thus securing that all-important inheritance or at least the best of the bone china.

The second age of the map is actual use. This is where the map is folded back and forth, forth and back. Sometimes if you are lucky you will get the concertina folds the right way round and the thing will fold away to its original size and not resemble a crumple the size of a beach ball, but don’t worry if you don’t. During the campaigning stage a map can be expected to pick up the following: raindrops, snowmelt, surf, rapid, tears, tears, animal prints, scorch marks, beer glass rings, wine glass rings (red and white), swatted insect smears, sun tan lotion greasy fingerprints, a tyre track, sand (beach), sand (storm) and probably at least one good soaking from that river you were sure was fordable.

The third age is as a reference tool. Used to get the spelling right when labelling your photographs, or to geotag your photographs, or to frame what’s left of it as a memento of your journey (‘look, you can see where the bullet passed through’), after you’ve festooned it with trail marks, red lines, comments, crosses, asterisks and many non-official markings (a pint with three stars being a favourite).

The Ireland touring map I used was everything you could want from a map, clear, robust and largely weatherproof – ideal for Ireland where unfurling a large piece of paper on the wild Atlantic coast can be something of a challenge of coordination and perception – trying to find the road to Killarney while the map thrashes in the wind like a salmon at the end of the line is something of an art. Trying to consult it in the open was not unlike unfurling a spinnaker and it’s a testament to the quality of the paper that it’s still more paper than selotape.