And Another Thing | 20 September 2008

Today’s Friday so we must be in Spain

Recently a Syrian lorry driver, making his cumbrous way across Turkey and Europe to Gibraltar, and following his satellite navigation system and online mapping service, found himself in Lincolnshire, on the Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve. These devices cannot make allowance for monoglot ignorance and soggy IQs of that magnitude. Nor do they merit the attack on what she called ‘corporate cartography’ recently launched at the RGS by Mary Spence. She is president of the Cartographic Society and ought to know better. Route maps on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, that is, omitting everything you don’t need, are not new: far from it. The distinction between geographical maps and topographical ones was made by Ptolemy, and road-journey maps go back to at least the 3rd century ad in the Roman Empire (and possibly even earlier in China). We do not possess any of these fragile parchment itineraries, but in Vienna there is a 13th-century copy, known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, of a document giving the principal routes through the Empire. Its purpose and limitations are revealed by its unusual shape, 6.7 metres long by 340 millimetres wide. If Mary Spence wants to know what these things look like, she need go no further than Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which has the original of the Chronica maiora of the great chronicler Matthew Paris. He was a beautiful artist as well as historian, and provides itineraries for Britain as well as one to the Holy Land.

There are millions of places and things in the world, and the art of cartography consists in deciding what to put in, and what to leave out, depending on the purpose of the map. I yield to no one in my admiration, and indeed love, of the Ordnance Survey one-inch-a-mile maps, and indeed own hundreds of them, some from 19th-century editions.