Mapping counties

We love maps.

Old maps, new maps, big maps, small maps, maps of roads, maps of trains, maps of crops, maps of rain, maps of here, maps of there, we love maps of everywhere. It's the nerdy geographer in us.

Maps tell stories, stories about the places they depict but also about the people doing the depicting. The organisation that now produces beautiful maps, the Ordnance Survey, started life with less benign objectives. It's first project, as its name suggests, was a military endeavour to map Scotland in order to help supress the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. It then moved on to map the southern shores of England when Napoleon threatened to invade. Ireland was next, mapped to provide the British colonial government with a basis on which to levy taxes. The emergence of cycling and motoring and other outdoor pursuits in the 19th century led to the publication of O.S. maps for leisure purposes - and in so doing become of potential interest to cider-makers, showing both the starting point of cider (orchards) as well as an end point (pubs). And O.S. maps continue to evolve; 6 new symbols were added recently, telling tales about the present that would be incomprehensible to earlier generations.

Some of the stories maps tell can be important. China, rather absurdly, claims sovereignty over huge tracts of ocean because it once created a map with 11 dashes (subsequently reduced to 9 and so referred to as the 9 Dash Line) encircling most of the South China Sea. Another absurdity is Mercator’s projection, until recently the most common map of the globe, which shows Greenland as the same size of Africa when Africa is in fact 14 times larger. Less absurdly, the Scottish government has recently passed a law requiring the Shetland Islands to be shown in their correct geographic location - half way to the Arctic, not in a box off the coast of Sutherland and Caithness. And not absurd at all, the citizens of New Zealand are fed up with their country being left off maps altogether.

Closer to home and rather less controversially the question has arisen whether Bristol is or was part of Gloucestershire or Somerset. Bristol is now, of course, its own city (a unitary authority, in the dry language of bureaucracy) but as recently as 1373 the bits of Bristol that really matter - the city centre, City Hall, the cathedral, both universities, Cabot Circus, the zoo, the Downs, The Watershed, Gloucester Road, the Volley and Port of Call pubs, more or less everything important (apart from Ashton Gate and the Riverside Garden Centre) - would have been part of Gloucestershire if Edward III hadn't granted Bristol status as its own county. There is a reason why Bristol is home to the Gloucestershire County Cricket Club and why Somerset play in Taunton.

Why does this matter? It doesn't.

But too many happy, youthful, summer days were spent in Bristol in the 1980s drinking Somerset cider (Taunton Natch) thinking it was part of Gloucestershire for us to change our minds now.

And why mention this now?

Last autumn, in collaboration with Riverside Garden Centre (in the Somerset part of Bristol, just), we made a small batch of cider made with apples from Bristol and which is now being distributed to homes in Bristol and Bath by The Ciderbox (a new cider bar in an old railway arch that was due to open on Saturday 28th March until The Lockdown got in the way - they deserve both our sympathy and our support). The Ciderbox has included our Bristol Blend cider within its Magic of Somerset collection.

SOMERSET??????

Actually, secretly we're quite chuffed. Somerset is a BIG cider county, second only to Herefordshire in this country, and the fame of Somerset cider extends much further and deeper than Gloucestershire's. Quality is as important as quantity and we’re happy for our ciders to be sold alongside the best from Somerset and we take it as a compliment. But it won't stop us from advocating the merits of Gloucestershire cider, or of being proud of our Gloucestershire provenance.

And when The Lockdown ends and when we can all meet again, we should head down to The Ciderbox, 5 Silverthorne Lane, Bristol BS2 0QD … a part of the city that 647 years ago was in GLOUCESTERSHIRE.

The Ordnance Survey's 6 new symbols.

These new symbols tell their own, early 21st century tale and would have been unthinkable just a few years ago … and unimaginable a century ago. Electric car-charging points and Solar farms tell of a growing awareness of climate change and our response to it. Art Galleries, Skateboarding parks and Kite-surfing locations reflect our growing prosperity (pre-Covid-19, at least) and the increasingly different ways in which we spend time and money at play. And a new, updated symbol for Public Conveniences possibly reflects their austerity related demise in the past few years; they are now so rare their existence demands a broadcast of its own rather than the modest “PC” that has been perfectly adequate for the past 100+ years. Either that, or a growing inability or unwillingness to read maps properly … ?

As ever, thank you for reading this random collection of thoughts.