Map as biography: maps, memory, and landscape – thoughts on Ordnance Survey map, Sheet TR04, 1:25,000 Provisional Edition, Ashford

While walking across the rough pasture on the hills above Ashford, Kent (UK), I experienced a dramatic vision. The dull green grassland turned a solid flat bright yellow (Figure 1). It was over in an instance, like the shutter movement of an old fashion camera, but very real – as if triggered by a physical light stimulus – not as something in my ‘mind’s eye’. While not a case of synaesthesia, that phenomenon is the best way I can describe what happened. Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimuli (e.g. reflected light) that usually affects one sense impacts on two or more others. Some synesthetes, for example, experience a ‘taste’ associated with a specific colour or word. Synaesthesia occurs when in normal circumstances a person might imagine a colour, but a synesthete will see it projected externally. For true synaesthesia the link is durable – this was not true for me, it has never happened again. A study of ‘colour-grapheme’ synesthetes indicates that pairings of letters with colours was traceable to childhood toys containing coloured letters (Witthoft & Winawer, 2013); the authors characterise this as ‘learned synaesthesia’. By the time I had my experience I had been using Land Utilisation Survey (LUS) maps (1930s) in local field teaching for decades (‘Weald of Kent & Hastings’ sheets 125 & 135). It seemed probable that the experience must have been stimulated by my familiarity with the LUS – the bright yellow I experienced represents ‘Heath, Moorland, Commons and rough pasture’. Clearly, maps can be a significant element in an immersive relationship with place (Vujakovic & Hills, 2017), not just as a navigation aid and store of spatial information but as an artefact that affords constant re-reading of, and re-engagement with a familiar milieu. Topographic maps (e.g. the British Ordnance Survey (OS) series, and related products, such as the LUS), provide a partial but significant representation of the cultural landscapes we inhabit. This paper argues for a ‘dwelling’ perspective (see below) in understanding the relationship between maps, person, and place, but one in which we need to understand the role of both agency and structure. Agency is the individual’s ability to think and act independently. By contrast, structure involves factors that constrain or limit agency. Structure can involve issues such as economics, social class, gender, and social mores.