Maps have fascinated me for most of my life. Old maps, new maps, paper maps, ring bound or fold-flat books, modern online digital maps, maps on CD, satellite navigation maps. Maps in general.
For the majority of my life consumer satellite navigation systems didn’t exist so we bought and planned trips & holidays using paper maps – maps of the major road networks down to town street maps. Back then I could memorise a route from home to any destination and had a decent sense of direction in case of a need to recalculate due to roadworks or unforeseen circumstances.
I bet I could still do it despite my age. Maybe. No, it’s not me challenging myself so don’t you try!
Speaking of old things, one of the most useful sources of historic data for the United Kingdom is the National Library of Scotland’s ‘Map images’ site at https://maps.nls.uk. 13 browsable categories are enough to please anyone like me. But that’s just the beginning.
Walking Pumpkin dog yesterday we came across an anomaly at the side of the road, a dropped kerb led directly nowhere. Well ok, into an unbroken well-established wall against a small earth bank.
6 maps in I found it on an Ordnance Survey1 map surveyed in 1928 – a ‘reservoir valve house’, whatever one of those is. It existed before the 1890 survey and was removed a decade or two before the end of the 20th century (I used to cycle up there, and have seen a lot of changes since I was young and fit)!
There are loads of reservoirs around the town, and to be honest although I’ve walked by and around some I never gave the engineering a second thought. Well ok, I’d be somewhat troubled if a dam wall burst and flooded the town.
Speaking of mortality and history, this again reminded me that of the 3 schools I attended as a child, only one still exists. Of the pubs I drank in as a young adult none now exist as pubs (they’re funeral parlours, offices and a private residence). Of those I frequented until my forties, one stl. Of the company buildings I worked in my family first is now a supermarket, I still work in the second, the third company (also the first) mismanaged their way out of the third building, and I still work in the fourth’s which is the second’s…2
And when my generation’s gone will anyone be interested in any of this, or will have other things taken attention spans?
Speaking of limited attention spans, I wondered earlier if my family is within the range of the ‘bad guys’. We have first to define bad guys – which is not as easy as it appears. Let’s say for the sake of advancing this the bad guys have missiles with a 2500-mile range.
Looking for a straight line distance measuring thing I found the ‘distance.to’ site, but it does more than straight lines. Check it out at https://www.distance.to. It’s translated into 17 languages and uses OpenStreetMap data. Nice.3
Are we within range? It’s marginal. Ask me next month when the bad guys may not be so simply and clearly defined.
Not the rabbit hole I expected this weekend.
Anyway, both sites get Baz’s seal of approval. 🦭
- I’ve not linked to the Ordnance Survey’s main site, it’s not tailored for casual users so I don’t visit. I use their excellent app instead. ↩
- Note to Baz: Edit this. Or not. ↩
- distance.to is a part of Stefan Georg’s https://distance.tools site – a very comprehensive set of online distance measuring tools for all kinds of users. ↩