The Ordnance Survey maps in the house when I was growing up had orange bands at the top and bottom of the covers, like my parents’ 1950s Penguin paperbacks. The maps themselves were printed on creamy, beautifully smooth paper, lettered in various sizes of various fonts. They charted the surrounding expanses of North East England, at an easily remembered scale of one inch to the mile. 

With their un-bypassed towns and long-defunct railway lines, these maps were also misleadingly out of date. When the time came to walk the territory without parental accompaniment, an upgrade to the next generation of maps was necessary. These had magenta covers with sans serif lettering, and showed the terrain at a metricated 1:50,000 scale, signalled in the margins by a little key-shaped emblem combining Union flag roundel and stylised letter ‘M’. Yet they too were quite challenging to follow on the ground, chiefly because the scale was too small to encompass field boundaries. Which side of the hedge or dry-stone wall to take, when to forge a path – legally – across growing crops: these dilemmas were eventually resolved by upgrading to the costlier, yellow-covered 1:25,000 series. No looking back since then, allowing for some more recent toggling between the paper maps and their downloadable digital avatars. 

Many people born in the second half of the last century will have had similar experiences, and will link the words ‘Ordnance Survey’ instantly to those impeccable but sometimes physically unruly folded sheets in their thin card covers. Yet there is surprisingly little about the familiar pocket maps in Will