My Favourite Map For Life, Not Just For Christmas
Give someone a map and you're passing on the gift of imagination, says Norman Hadley. Four decades after receiving a Lake District set - now torn and crackly, but still much loved - he has never stopped dreaming of the fells. Maps are for life,...
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This is the level of nerdery I'm here for - top marks. As soon as you mentioned Sheet 19, Dan, I didn't need to look it up. In an instant, it takes me back to being, by coincidence, 19 and hitching from Durham to Dundonnell to stomp up An Teallach in mist and sog, then hitching round the coast road for Beinn Alligin. Heaven knows how many kindly strangers' passenger seats I dripped on that trip.
This was a great article for a Monday morning in the little peace I stole for a coffee, after the kids’ breakfast but before they were dressed and needed a lift to school.
That is a good sheet - but, less specifically, there is something about that bright pink cover and the layout of OS landranger maps that is almost emotive. I find topographical detail much easier to read on a Harvey map, but there’s a lack of magic and possibility, that your article described so well.
My favourite is sheet 36, slightly clichéd, but contains so many childhood and teenage memories - and with my own kids - not to mention hill days and nights, that I can probably lose myself in reminiscence for sometime looking at it, and still see endless new possibilities.
I think I would have joined you fighting over Landranger 19, but since paddling has taken over from hillwalking more and more, the next one up, sheet 15, is probably the winner. I have a 1" version of it too, found in immaculate condition at work. As for Explorers, though the detail struggles for the complexity of the Cuillin, Explorer 411, they look simply amazing at 1:25k and the cartography is a real artwork.
Have to say v surprised only three comments on this was hoping for a good debate on this topic!
Have you been to Bad Bog. It intruiged me too.