Understanding Maps

We live in a world full of devices which, it is claimed, make life easier. Hardly anyone under the age of 45 can remember what it was like before the invention of hand-held calculators when, if you wanted to keep check of your purchases before you got to the checkout, you had to be pretty good at mental arithmetic. The daily 20 minutes of mental arithmetic tests we did as 11-year-olds did much more than equip us for sensible shopping; it meant that we came to observe things in a mathematical way – we noted relationships and proportions, calculated average speeds on our bikes and became good at accurate approximations.

Then came the spell check on the computer, followed by the grammar check which all too often means that we end up receiving letters and documents so carefully written that they are devoid of any fascinating originality, and never use split infinitives to good effect. Now it is proposed to drop map reading from the Geography GCSE exam on the basis – wait for it –that as most cars have GPS systems it is no longer necessary to be able to read a map to work out how to get from A to B.

It is a well-known truism about the human brain that you either use it, or you lose it. As a species we have evolved through our ability to handle multiple forms of intelligence. One of these is an innate appreciation of number and quantity. Another is our amazing ability to communicate, not simply on paper but with verbal expressions that transmit almost as much by the tone with which something is said, as they do with the technicality of appropriate grammar. Then there is our innate sense of spatial awareness; how we find our way around a crowded cocktail party, carefully avoiding an old flame or the world’s biggest bore. But the more dependent we become on such technical devices, the more our intelligences rust away.

Reading a map is a case in point; last weekend my wife and I walked from the City of Bath to the Cathedral in Wells to join the celebrations for the 1100th anniversary of the founding of the Diocese. There is an obvious route – the A39 at 19 miles from centre to centre – which if you slog it out along the road, keeping close to the verge so as to avoid cars passing you at 55 mph or more, you will get there in six hours leaving plenty of time to sit in a pub moaning about the maniacal drivers. But if you want to combine interest with travel there are several other routes made long ago by pilgrims, traders, and farmers as they followed the gentle undulations of the valleys, or kept on the high ground to avoid a marsh. Some of them are shown on today’s maps as footpaths but to the Romans those straight lines were major roads along which the infantry marched at 4 mph; while others were drove-roads down which traders would drive cattle to market. Others, often in the most unprepossessing of places, were laboriously paved by pounding together of hundreds of thousands of stones to produce a still-useable hard surface. One, which today doesn’t seem to go anywhere in particular was marked mysteriously on the map as Nanny Hurns Lane.

While several of our colleagues reached Wells in less than 7 hours, Anne and I chose a very different route, one dependent upon reading the maps carefully and difficult to describe as it avoided most villages, and we only walked for less than a quarter of a mile on a significant road. It was a beautiful day, almost clear skies, warm and with a slight wind. On what was possibly one of the last Saturdays of summer we did not see a single youngster of school age in the eleven and three quarter hours it took us to ramble over some twenty-five miles of magnificent countryside. On arriving in Wells the marketplace was crowded, as were the teashops. But few, I think had seen the dawn break that day, or the startled deer, or the hares bounding across our path, or the late blossoming of this year’s honeysuckle. If the tea drinkers could have read their maps they would have realised what delights there were beyond the ‘red’ lines.

See Part Ten and Actions 2 and 4 of the Briefing Paper

This article is tagged: evolution, maps, The Brain.