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| Maps in books ... |
When I gave my godson a book recently which I thought he might enjoy, he was thrilled to find that it had maps at the front. "I love maps!" he declared. Well, he is only 11. Although I love maps too, and I'm (nearly) grown up. I remember the excitement of following our progress in the atlas when out in the car (yes, this was pre-Sat Nav): I spent hours poring over the OS map for our area to look for bridleways and places to ride or walk to (and still do): the only geography lessons that actually captured my attention at school where those on map-reading and what all those squiggly lines and interesting icons meant ... I even had maps hanging on my bedroom wall - a giant poster of Middle Earth, a tea towel showing Kruger National Park (my Dad had visited while on an overseas business trip) and an old 18th century print of Northamptonshire, where I stayed during the holidays.
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| Maps to wondrous places ... |
I get a kick out of seeing maps in fiction books too - whether imaginary places such as the Six Duchies of Robin Hobbs' trilogy of trilogies, or Anne McCaffrey's Pern, or real ones such as in Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books. I even have a map and street directory of Ankh-Morpork ...
I have all sorts of proper maps too, ranging from guides to places like Stowe Landscape Gardens and Chiltern Open Air Museum, to a number of OS maps and road atlases (can't abide SatNav).
I'm always especially thrilled to discover places in a book that you can find on a modern day map, although sometimes you have to do your own donkey work in finding the locations of places mentioned.
Three Men in a Boat is one of my favourite books, and it's lovely not just to be able to trace the locations on a map, but to have them so close by to visit. There are places which are barely changed and you can half close your eyes and easily imagine J, Harris and George sculling past, with Montmorency keeping watch at the pointy end.
The same applies to Susan Cooper's
The Dark is Rising - although some are a series of composites, based on places such as Dorney Common and Cliveden, others, such as Huntercombe Lane and Windsor Great Park really exist in their own right, and all of them can be visited both by map and, if you cant get there on your own two feet, via Google Earth.
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| Which way? Check the map! |
I recently picked up copies of William Cobbet's Rural Rides and Alison Uttley's Buckinghamshire and again, it is lovely to track down the places mentioned. Sadly, having succumbed long ago to 'progress' and 'development', sometimes those real places in books have changed so much that they are almost unrecognisable. T
hank goodness then, for Jerome, Cooper, Cobbet, Uttley and all those others who have written so lovingly and vividly of these places, preserving them forever in the mind's eye, long after reality has hidden them from view beneath layers of concrete and tarmac, and they have vanished from maps ...
Please forgive me if I finish with another teeny weeny plug for Haunting Hounds as 50% of all royalties go to a wonderful charity - Kim's Home - please buy a copy or send it as a gift to someone else!
Find out more about the book HERE
and about Kim's Home HERE
Comments
Have always maintained, though, that the A-Zs are probably the most useful series of books ever published, and I have quite a collection of them dating from pre-SatNav days.
And yes, there is an undeniable romance in spreading out a large map on the floor and studying the firths and mountain ranges, the rivers and villages. An accurate map is a beautiful piece of work.
Tolkien's maps bear testimony to Orlando Bloom fluffing his line as Legolas in The Two Towers. 'The uruks turned north east! They are taking the hobbits to Isengard.' Isengard at the time lay in almost the opposite direction.
That's why Satnav is better of course.