The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Nothing spurs the roamer’s curiosity quite as romantically as OS Landranger maps
Weekend breakfast at The Bothy, in Braemar, has become a ritual of late. We normally favour a small table out of the way but, when it’s busy, often the only available seats are “bar style”, pressed up against a wall. This, however, is fine, due to two conjoined Ordnance Survey (OS) Landranger maps that adorn the wall at that location.
On Landrangers, each 2cm square on the map depicts 1km on the ground. End to end, across 1.6 metres of Bothy wall, is 80km of Deeside, from the Feshie headwaters in the west, to Aboyne in the east.
As conversation ebbs and flows, I stare at the map – sometimes consciously, sometimes not, but all the while I am looking for new lines up familiar hills, good viewpoints, unfamiliar points of interest or, typically, for nothing in particular.
Ironically, given a map’s principal function is helping me to locate myself, I find it very easy to lose myself in one.
I suspect that’s because I’ve grown up with maps. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in the back of the car as we drove to a Cornish holiday, flipping absent-mindedly through the Collins Road Atlas.
I can vividly remember the pull that the sparser places in Collins exerted on me. The absence of roads or settlements was more interesting than the places with features in abundance. The blank spaces of Dartmoor and Bodmin fired my imagination.
Fascinating as Collins was, it paled to my grandma’s older Bartholomew road atlas, which used a wide range of colours to depict topography. You could look down and instantly see the height, extent and arrangement of valleys and mountains. Yep, Bartholomew was a visual treat, a thing of beauty.
Eating my breakfast with my knees to the wall, I realised how little I’ve changed in 40 years. I readily, and willingly, still find myself set into a trance by paper maps.
I do use online OS maps to fine-tune my walks in advance, but I love the ritual of opening a paper map to its full extent in order to view the wider context, meticulously scouring an area for walk ideas.
I was reminded of this just last week, as I was heading north to Sutherland. Packing for a week away is a chore, but it’s redeemed by the obligatory visit to the “pink shelf” in the living room, to prise out the 3 or 4 maps I’ll need to comprehensively cover wherever I’m spending the next week.
Pink, because that’s the colour of the OS Landranger covers. Each map is numbered (1 to 204), and yes, I’ve got them arranged in ascending order. Eighty-eight maps cover Scotland, but I don’t own all of them because I’ve never bought a map I wasn’t going to imminently use.
Now that I think about it, wherever I’ve lived, the pink shelf has always had prominence in my home, unconsciously given pride of place. Collectively, it’s among my most-prized possessions.
Picking maps from the shelf, and seeing them laid out with my gear, is always a lovely moment. Last week it was 9, 15 and 16. Cracking numbers, those! Cape Wrath; Loch Assynt; Lairg and Loch Shin. Just seeing the names in front of me, with the evocative photos on the covers, builds anticipation of imminent adventure.
Doing away with paper maps completely, in favour of digital, would mean missing out on this simple pleasure. Of not having a favourite or most-used map number. Of not seeing a map fraying and tearing because it’s been so well loved.
No map is perfect of course, and folk obviously have their preferences. Some prefer larger scale, OS Explorer maps, where everything is twice as big on the paper/screen and more detail can be shown. Others prefer the “created by walkers for walkers” maps from Harveys.
Each brand has its place, but as someone who grew up with, and learned to navigate with Landranger, I feel oddly loyal even though it might not always be the best choice for the terrain in question.
It’s possibly a bit eccentric to have attached so much emotion and affection to something that, 250 years ago, was founded purely as a military asset. But those pink covers have been constant companions on so many of my most memorable adventures, that it’s hard not to view them fondly.
From the colours to the contours, from the symbols right down to the friendly Univers font, OS Landrangers are, in my opinion, little works of art.
≤ Ben Dolphin is an outdoors enthusiast, countryside ranger and former president of Ramblers Scotland