Were you taught to read a map?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Same here, orientated by the compass.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

Me too, but I wonder if OS do tactile maps now? I know at the moment they are making their data free for the duration of the emergency, as they are after all a commercial company these days.

I have been reading the latest rules though, and nowhere is off limits as long as you do it in the spirit of the isolation rules. IE if you are in a tower block and the nearest park is outside the city you can drive there as long as the only people in that vehicle are from the same household, and when you get there you try to remain separated from others so to speak, not in your little bubble. These people who ask such questions in my experience are mostly on line and there are very clear FAQ lists on the gov and nhs web sites. Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

65 - 78

I think there was some basic map reading and making in Geography 'O' Level.

Self/Dad taught as a lad. Used to do all the navigating when on family trips out.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa)]

I went to school fron around 1954 to 1966, and in the final year they did explain map reading but we did stuff like contour lines etc in earlier years as part of other subjects. Brian

[spuorgelgoog]

It certainly was in the 1980s - I remember being supposed to learn and draw the symbols on the key, draw a sketch map of somewhere, and taking a line A-B draw a profile from the contours. And that was 2nd year - I didn't make it to O Level.

Of course I'd been taught to read a map by my father, who'd been over France and the Low Countries in the mid 1940s mapping them (only over them, landing was a bit tricky at the time). Presumably that's what he got his Fellowship of the RGS for. He was also a geologist (picked up a geological microscope from Leitz in September 1945) and had various fossils, as well as a lot of photos of me as a young child in front of rock formations. I was there for scale.

And ever diary had a Tube map inside the back cover (no matter how small) so even if you were brought up on Shetland you were familiar with the London Underground.

The day the Times Atlas Of The World arrived in the house we almost slaughtered a chicken.

Owain

[spuorgelgoog]

I remember learning where all the British coal mines *are*

And of course the miners' strikes were very useful for learning the geography of the working-class bits of Britain.

Owain

[spuorgelgoog]

I wonder if that was ever declared and tax paid to UK Customs?

Owain

[Andy Burns]

Secondary school in early 70's geography taught us using maps and compass.

[Andy Burns]

Our geography teacher clearly had it in for the C.A.P. even back then :-)

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

on 05/05/2020, [e-mail] supposed :

I used to love doing that, and doing a profile of mountain footpaths - very revealing of what to expect on the routes.

[GB]

No

--

[Cynic]

I went camping two years running (first and second form) with the school. An empty farmhouse with adjacent flattish field called Cosh up the valley from Halton Gill. The list of kit we had to take included the os map for the area. We were taken on rambles around the valley and introduced to map reading. Later on in the fifth form we were taken on a field trip to Millington Pastures for a days formal map reading. GCE O level geography exam included a map reading question about the upper reaches of the Derwent. 20 marks as a gift!

[Davey]

A couple of years ago, he got caught up in a pointless case, when a woman at the radio station accused him of holding her shoulder too intimately, or something. The station over-reacted, for a while he could not even get access to his own recordings, and he quit the programme, which was taken on by somebody else. Then later, I read that it had all been sorted, but he was happy to leave A Prairie Home Companion in its new hands. He is not young any more.

The best-ever Lake Woebegone story by him was:

Bruno the Fishing Dog.

A true example of how to tell a story, by a master. I don't know if it's available in an archive, but it's worth finding if it is.

[Apd]

My time at secondary school was early 60s and I don't remember map reading being taught. What I do demember is having a lot of fun and doing as little work as possible to get the recommended 5 'O' levels thought to be the necessary minimum to get a decent job.

During that time I joined the army cadets and map reading was taught there. It was something I very much enjoyed. We went on orienteering exercises in competition with other units and I still have the compass each of our group won on two occasions. Since then I've always carried OS maps in the car covering areas I've been travelling.

[ARW]

I had access to maps that showed you mines that were shut down 200 years ago.

[Max Demian]

Don't forget oxbow lakes. And the teacher saying that when *he* was a boy, he had to learn "capes and bays" around Britain.

[Max Demian]

I don't recall learning anything of practical use in school.

[Indy Jess John]

I have a friend who lives in Florida, and he moved house and sent me his new address on a newly built estate, which included a house number in the 3,000s.

I looked up the Zip Code on Google maps and I couldn't see any existing road in that area or any space for a new road long enough to have 3,000 addresses so I asked him where I could find the street he had told me he now lived had been built, and how far along it his house was. He told me roughly where his road went off from an existing road I could see on the map, and he explained that unlike Britain where houses are numbered for each street, in Florida the numbers are by district and the use of a street name is just to narrow down the area the number is located.

They certainly do things differently over there.

Jim

[Nick Odell]

The trouble is that the Americans are useless map makers.

As John Steinbeck said, you can not find The Pastures of Heaven in California because the land surveyor overlooked a crease in his drawing paper and Garison Keillor explained the absence of Lake Wobegone on the map of Minnesota was due to an error of draftsmanship. There are so many other examples....

Hopeless....

Nick

[John Rumm]

Secondary school, early 80's. We certainly did map work in (human) geography... understanding OS maps and symbology, 6 figure grid references, contour lines etc.

I don't recall being taught route planning though.

Not really...