5 Ways to Use a Map

Ordnance Survey's
'5 Ways to Use a Map'

Here are Ordnance Survey's suggestions from their email of 11th August:

5 ways to use maps or OS getamap prints with your family...

As well as for walking and exploring, there are loads of other fun ways for the whole family to use OS getamap printed maps this summer. You could...

1. Discover a new activity using maps. You could try orienteering, treasure hunts or find a geocache with a GPS.

2. Visit a National Park and head on a walk or bike ride, find ponds to skim stones on or even roll down some hills!

3. Make a quiz on map symbols or features and test your friends and family (Great if the weather is not so good!)

4. Go on a night walk to spot the
night-time wildlife and mark the place on the map, or spend some time stargazing.

5. Chart new territory in the local area or further afield. Make it a family mission to visit somewhere you've never been.
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Phil Smith's
'5 Ways to Use a Map'

1. Draw/write down the legend icons and their meanings and put them into two separate bags – drawing one from each bag assign the icons (mostly) new and chance meanings; write and attach this new legend to your map, so that you allow phantom landscapes to settle over the mapped ones you then walk.

2. Search charity and junk shops and buy the most battered OS map you can find – or alternatively take  a new map for a walk over a terrain that it represents and subject it to that terrain (for example, tie it to your boot or drag it along on a piece of string) - explore the landscape now represented by torn and lost parts, worn creases, and the spots and smears of dirt.

3. Buy, say, four OS maps for terrains that are adjacent to each other. Set yourself a limited time (say, a year of walking once a week, or a whole month) and explore these areas noting the spaces of most intense experience. After the limited time is up, cut out the sections of the map that represent the areas of most intense experience and make a new map with them. Then spend the same limited amount of time re-walking these places and exploring for a route of intensity that can link them all together. Map the interconnecting links, photocopy and pass on to friends – or, alternatively, lead your friends on a pilgrimage of intensity along the route and around the terrains.

4. Re-interpret the routes on a map as the veins and arteries of a body  - travels to major organs and conduct surgery there.

5. Buy a map of the area you know best – examine the map minutely, one gridded rectangle at a time, looking for signs of intriguing places never visited but just off your usual routes. Do not go yourself, but set yourself the task of telling others about what you think might be at these places. Don’t overtly encourage them to go, just describe your fantasies and let them search them out if they wish.