landscape
York: Remembering I’m Always In The Middle
March 23rd 2006
The river Ouse was, for a long time, the bloodstream of mercantile York. In Roman times it provided the means to transport bulk goods for the military (grain, for example, as seen in the remnants of beetle-infested Roman grain cellars along Coney Street). It allowed cost-effective transportation of raw and worked materials in and out of the city, allowing the economy to thrive, thus aiding the development of the high-prestige specialised industries that made York such a focal-point in English medieval craftworking. It helped people into York, and it helped people stay here. It also, like any self-respecting bloodstream, carried away a lot of the filth generated in the process.
Travel Tip: Smapping
Whenever I go anywhere new, I keep an eye out for information boards, so I can smap them.
Smapping is the process of taking a digital photograph of a map that you won’t have access to later, except if you take a snap of it.
My first smap was of the Durham train station ‘You Are Here’ glass-encased map.
Smapping also works nicely with maps and guides that other people want to take away and read.
At first sight, squinting at a tiny digital camera screen might seem a frustrating and fruitless exercise – until you remember that you can zoom in, making the map detail many times larger than real life if need be.
(Of course, if you don’t speak the language it’s in, more detail might not help you too much).
Smapping also works for taking a record of something you want to read later.
The main disadvantage is that your smap runs on batteries. So take plenty of them.
The final reward of being a compulsive smapper is that your photographic record is stuffed full of automatically-gathered facts and figures to work into your diary write-up or post-holiday bragging. All without using a scrap of paper.
(All maps property of map illustrators/sponsors, as displayed).
