On Ordnance Survey maps



Every so often it is decided by the powers that be that a clergyman’s soul will benefit from a visit to a Diocesan retreat house. This occasional episcopal prescription was last issued to me prior to my priesting, a little under a year or so ago, and so I was dispatched to Foxhill, a Victorian pile with predictable 70s adjuncts, tucked behind the great humped back of Helsby Hill just to the East of Ellsmere Port in Cheshire. All retreat houses are strange places. They are furnished with furniture that walks the line (enforced, I imagine, by budget rather than by theology)  between cold hard monastic simplicity and flammable conference centre plush. They are littered with books, the names the priests that owned them still carefully written in the front, though they be as dead as the theology they often contain and with countless prints of icons- Rublev’s Trinity, mostly.

How strange for those painted angels to transition first, from the oak of Mamre, then to the splendours of the St Sergian Lavra and then to end up as faded print outs in the middling country houses near railway lines where the Church of England sends us to enter the Wilderness. But no; my tone there is too harsh. They are put up with the purest of intentions, and if a Cheshire villa wishes to evoke the strange piety of the Rus or the parched holiness of Mamre, then all strength to its arm say I. Still, my instinctive reaction reveals a truth- these icons could not and did not hold my attention for long. Instead, to my shame, I was fixated by an ordnance survey map of the surrounding area that hung just outside the Warden’s office.

Over the course of this 40 days compressed into 4, it rained almost constantly but, in the rare episodes of sun, I took to wandering the garden, strolling among the long blades of grass, too wet to be mown. There, ankles wet not with hyssop but grassy dew, I chastised myself for this map fixation, for my lack of attention span or generosity of spirit or, perhaps most fearfully, of faith, that rendered the more pious prints available of no interest. Yet, deep down, I knew this was no new obsession; maps more generally have always been a source of joy to me, as I know they are to many others. Why would one seek to peer through the grubby panes of Soho when a much more visceral thrill might be found staring longingly at the geographic plates of beauty sold a short stroll away on Cecil Court?

In terms of romance, the ordnance survey is, of course, not quite in the league of those maps scratched onto vellum by the fervid imagination of an Anglo-Saxon monk or those sketched by avaricious plunderers of the southern seas. However, it has achieved, like so many of those practical things that stick around long enough to become beautiful and not just convenient, the status of style icon. It has also effected that link between longevity and reliability so prized by consumer and producer alike- for which is the hand which has not hovered over the supermarket yeast extract only to return, inexorably, to the recognisable yellow lid and Victorian style label and place the pleasingly heavy jar of Marmite into a shopping basket? Put another way, if Google maps is Oddbins, then the ordnance survey is Berry Bros.

Yet, for all these undoubted benefits, they defeat the basic object of a map, in that they paint a picture of a landscape, of an England, not so much as it is but rather as it was, or, more accurately, how it was conceived to be. How ridiculous that a Wetherspoons, its barns more like factory farms of shattered hopes than a pub, should be represented by a dimpled beer pot, a talisman of a Betjemanesque vision of England belonging at once to history and to fantasy. How ridiculous, and yet, how glorious too. In the mere reading of the cursive text and very oddness of the word ‘tumulus’, I can imagine myself an antiquarian, scouring the country for vestiges of civilisations long dead. Within something as simple as the contrast between the round or square based cross, the sign of the stone or shingle clad dominance of the parish church, and the simple +, indicating the squat hall where Presbyterian or Papist made their prayer, there is a tale of great depth, and power, and pain to be told and one into the worn grooves of which so much of our national character has, for better or worse, settled.

All this- though to the world of sat-nav, probably indicative of some sort of mental condition- is why an ordnance survey map is, to me, a source of atavistic joy and of ordinary glory. They are a gesture of defiance against a bleak and empirical world that would present things solely as they are to the naked eye. A representation of a land transformed- where the messy reality of what we know to be present on the ground is not replaced by the totally fantastical but rather rendered as a better version of itself, redeemed if you will. It is for these reasons that I gazed with such fascinated intent on something as simple as a map of the marshy area near to Ellesmere Port.

Perhaps they have more in common with icons than I might first have owned as I doubted amid the long Cheshire grass.

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