Getting there...

Last Saturday we were up in the High Peaks picking up Holly from her Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme outbound weekend. Part of The DOE is to find your way around with just a map and a compass… a map and a compass?

Now, I don’t know about you but I’ve never really got the hang of compasses despite the fact I used to have one in the sole of my shoe when I was a boy. No, really - how proud I was of my Wayfinders, my adventure shoes – sensible black lace-ups, compass in the inner sole, ten animal footprints imprinted on the outer sole, so that if you came across an animal track you could slip off your shoe, stand in the mud in your grey socks, and see if it was a rabbit, a fox, a badger, a deer, an otter, a racoon, a mongoose, a polar bear, a unicorn, a yeti… no dog footprint though, if there had been a dog footprint then I would have tracks to follow to my hearts content.
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No, I never have had the hang of compasses, and I’m not even slightly good with maps, so it’s a good job I live in the UK where our land(s) are small enough to carry a broad mental map in our heads.

I’m okay as long as I know (more or less) which large town my destination is close to. If I know this I can usually get within twenty miles of it without the need for a map, and once I’m THAT close there are always signposts. Not that they can always be relied on.

In Wales the signposts often point in completely the wrong direction – turned around by young (they have to be young to reach) jokers delivering a blow for Welsh Nationalism to lost holidaymakers. I must have spent cumulative weeks totally lost in my early years of becoming Welsh, trying to find my way home from this place or that place on narrow roads that never seemed to be the same road twice – even when they were.

I know the roads very well now but still occasionally one pops up that I haven’t travelled before. I think they just appear from nowhere, from the past or maybe the future; and I can never resist taking them. It’s got me into some really interesting situations over the years I can tell you (and probably will in some future post).

I still remember the old wooden signposts from my Oxfordshire boyhood, white painted, hand-carved, beautifully ornate. Who made and maintained them? I never saw anyone painting them (maybe they were self-maintained by magic, the past is a bit like that) and of course there were the worn stone milestones by the side of multiple arched, mellow stone bridges, the lazy river meandering its way beneath - ‘Aylefbury 5 milef’.

Thank goodness for my sat-nav. Without it I don’t think we would have found Holly at Hartington in the wilds of the High Peaks. I’d have got within a few miles (Buxton) using my mental map - but after that it would have been down to road signs, and I don’t know if this is just me, but road signs seem to be getting fewer and farther between.

Yes thank goodness for sat-nav – ‘Please turn right in two hundred yards and continue to follow the road’ – not that I had any plans to stop following the road and go cross country. Perhaps sat-nav technology is the cause of the demise of the road sign – after all, who needs road signs, maps, and compasses when we have a Global Positioning System?

Maybe road signs are going the way of the other interesting things I saw in Hartington. The commemorative pump that’s no longer used (internal plumbing is the norm now I believe), the old Victorian post-box (yes another!), standing outside a tea-room behind an outside table and some chairs (I had to move them), and the phone box (despite offering e-mail, text and phone) was very dusty inside (I know, I looked, my finger came away black when I wiped the receiver).

How long the signpost?

These days we can all arrive at our destination without the need for a mental map. You no longer need to know where you are going to get there. There’s no need to plan a route, look at a map, consult an A-Z. These days you can get to where you are going without having to worry about the journey.

I wonder if that’s a good thing… after all what is the destination without the journey… and what is the journey without knowing the route that led you there?

Yes, I’m for putting the compass back in our shoes.