Britain and Ireland on the Hereford Mappa Mundi

 

6. GOD IS IN THE DETAIL

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

˜ Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Man’s eternal need to define God has meant that the Almighty has had almost as big an influence on the history of mapping as that other great human impetus, war. The two are, of course, indissolubly linked.

Maps are used to demonstrate God, in an attempt to quantify and codify the divine, but they can also encourage us to stray into the territory of acting like tin gods ourselves. There is something superhuman in the unfurling of a map, a feeling that you are, in some small way, lord and master of all you survey. It’s not just the wartime generals gathered round enormous charts, using canes to push model tanks and men hither and thither with deistic determination; perhaps the same surge of power comes for managing directors of contract-cleaning businesses, gleefully tapping the British map on the wall of their Portakabin HQ as they demonstrate to Gerald from Admin and Tracy from Accounts the next advance into new postcode districts.

This latter image has sprung to my mind a lot lately, with regard to the omniscient god of today, Tesco. At the moment, I’m happy to live in the least Tescoed part of Britain south of the Scottish Highlands. It doesn’t impact on my life in the slightest, as the nearest store is a full hour’s drive away, which always gives me a smug little frisson when I overhear the anguished debate in middle-class circles about its sweeping predominance. The county of Powys, occupying a quarter of Wales, contains not one branch of Britain’s biggest supermarket: it was repeatedly mentioned as a contributory factor in some recent lifestyle survey in which our county was declared to be the happiest place to live in Britain. Not for long, though. In one fell swoop, Tesco has announced new stores for Llandrindod Wells, Welshpool, Newtown and Machynlleth, a four-pronged offensive that I feel coldly certain all began at a map. Somewhere deep in its headquarters, there’s surely a huge wall-mounted plan of Britain, about fifty feet high and flagged with every branch of Tesco, Tesco Metro, Tesco Express, Tesco Ultra, Tesco Plus, Tesco Gold or Tesco Whatever. Every time executives passed it, they glowered at the great void in the middle of Wales, and swore to fill it with their flags. The deities of the cult of BOGOF have pronounced, and we will tremble before them.

The god-like feelings somehow seem more acute the greater the scale of the map being scrutinised. There is something almost voyeuristic about the Ordnance Survey’s largest-scale maps, those at a whopping 1:500, just over ten feet to the mile. Here, you can poke your nose into every outhouse, manhole cover, lamp-post, public toilet, shop, pub and railway station platform. The original series even showed ground-floor room divisions within any public building. In these days of hovering over satellite imagery of our neighbours’ back yards, searching for swimming pools to crash or pondering the suburban ubiquity of those circular trampolines, such close-range cartography might seem quaintly archaic, but its stark clarity and detailed annotation still have the power to shock. How far do you go? Lewis Carroll, in his phantasmagorical last novel, Sylvie and Bruno (published in two volumes in 1889 and 1893), floated numerous bizarre ideas and inventions, many of them satires of the obsessions of the late Victorian age. One such obsession was maps: their prosaic ubiquity was something that the theosophically minded Carroll evidently rather disapproved of and, in this novel, took to its warped conclusion in the form of a map with ‘the scale of one mile to the mile’. This leads to the abandonment of maps altogether, as it is noted that ‘we now use the country itself as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well’. The conceit was reprised by Jorge Luis Borges in his one-paragraph story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946, but purporting to be from a piece entitled Travels of Praiseworthy Men, from 1658, by the fictional J. A. Suarez Miranda):

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

Carroll and Borges lightly satirise the map-maker’s obsession with topographical exactitude; imagine what they would have made of subsequent developments in cartography, let alone the revolution of GPS and satellite technology (though Lewis Carroll would perhaps have loved the chance to zoom into close-ups of schoolyards from the comfort of his armchair). Maps encouraging us to feel like gods of all we survey are a comparatively recent phenomenon, for, although the pursuit of topographical ‘truth’ has always been a major impetus in the creation of maps, many other strands—cultural, artistic, political, geodetic, religious—have fed their development too.

The godlike 1:1 map is the extreme end of cartographic obsession, and is as far as can possibly be imagined from the earliest Western maps. In these, topographic understanding was entirely subsidiary to our place before God Himself: the map, like every other art form, was considered, first and foremost, to be an allegorical representation of the divine. In the Christian tradition, they were little more than crude—if very beautiful—propaganda, for the rough shapes of Europe, Asia and Africa were well known by the early medieval period, but such knowledge was largely ignored when it came to drawing the maps. Indeed, demonstrating too great a passion for scientific understanding, such as of the actual shape and dispersion of the continents, was harshly persecuted as pagan and heretical; as Lloyd A. Brown puts it in The Story of Maps: ‘The lamp of scientific knowledge, a tremulous flame at best, was obscured for a time by the blinding light of religious ecstasy.’ ‘For a time’ is putting it mildly; the suppression of scientific understanding by ultrazealous Christianity began in about the fourth century AD, and it is something we are still struggling with seventeen centuries later.

The first Christian map of the world dates from the middle of the sixth century, part of the Topographia Christiana (‘Christian Topography’) of Cosmas Indicopleustes of Alexandria. Cosmas converted to Christianity after a long career as an itinerant merchant; he had sailed many of the world’s seas and visited numerous countries in Africa and Asia (his second name means ‘sailed to India’). Unfortunately, the ‘blinding light of religious ecstasy’ rather eclipsed his extensive firsthand knowledge, and the eleven-book Topographia, although it contains much useful geographical information, is an extended religious tract that twists every piece of evidence into fitting his newly acquired dogma. Cosmas’s map shows the Earth as a flat, rectangular shape—precisely that of a tabernacle, in fact, the house of worship described to Moses by God during the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. This notion was nothing more than an extremely literal interpretation of the words of St Paul (Hebrews 9: 1-2: ‘Then verily the first covenant had also ordinances of divine service, and a worldly sanctuary. For there was a tabernacle made; the first, wherein was the candlestick, and the table, and the shewbread; which is called the sanctuary’). The ocean forms a border, in the middle of which is the rectangular landmass, with a few seas, most convincingly the Mediterranean, nibbled out of it. Paradise is to the east, beyond the ocean.

Cosmas explains further in the accompanying text. The world, he states, is flat, shaped and laid out exactly like the tabernacle described in St Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, with the heavens forming the shape of a curved lid above. He is especially vitriolic towards those who believe that the planet is spherical:

Here then the Pagans are at war with divine Scripture; but, not content with this, they are at war also with common sense itself and the very laws of nature, declaring, as they do, that the earth is a central sphere, and that there are Antipodes, who must be standing head-downward and on whom the rain must fall up.

He is even more vicious in his denunciation of the idea that the Earth and the heavens rotate. The sun, he explains, vanishes every night because it disappears behind a vast conical mountain in the extreme north, while the revolution of the stars at night is simply a waggish illusion laid on by angels hanging around in the firmament as they wait for the Resurrection. Despite the belief of the ‘pagans’ that the sun is many, many times the size of the Earth, Cosmas confidently declares that to be rubbish; it is, he declaims, only around six hundred miles wide. Although his work influenced many subsequent Christian maps and topographies, the Topographia Christiana lay forgotten for centuries, until it was rediscovered in Florence in the late seventeenth century by the all too aptly named French scholar Emeric Bigot.

Cosmas’s tabernacle-shaped Earth resurfaced in other maps over the ensuing centuries, although many cartographers, using different biblical references, chose to draw it in other ways. The idea of a square or rectangular Earth, though not necessarily in the shape of a vast tabernacle, was said to be decreed by Isaiah 11:12 (‘And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth’), while those who preferred the idea of the Earth as a vast, flat disc could call on Isaiah 40:22 (‘It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in’).

In the Western Christian tradition, there was little progress in cartographic detail from the sixth century until the turn of the fourteenth: nearly all of the six hundred or so surviving maps from this period plough the same well-worn furrows. At least the circular maps hint at the reality of the Earth’s shape, and they are often spectacularly elaborate and beautiful to look at. Most of these are in the form of what became known as T-O maps, from the tradition of dividing the three known continents in a T-shape, contained within a larger O. Occupying the half of the map above the top of the T is Asia, the bottom-left quadrant Europe and the bottom-right Africa, although there are also symbolic meanings in the T as a crucifix and the three continents mirroring the Holy Trinity. Some scholars of the time claimed the existence of a fourth continent, in the Antipodes, but they were fiercely denounced as heretics. The maps are full of divine codes and symbols, landscapes of life and death as much as physical geography. Jerusalem is always placed at their centre.

The more lavish of these early medieval world views are known as mappae mundi. The term mappa mundi is not, as is commonly assumed, ‘a map of the world’, but ‘a cloth of the world’: a subtle, but important, distinction. The finest of all mappae mundi can be found in Hereford Cathedral, an example that can be dated fairly precisely to the tail end of the thirteenth century, as both of the brand new castles at Conwy and Caernarfon are shown. The Hereford map, a substantial 54 × 64 inches, was inscribed on a single piece of vellum, one of the reasons that it has survived so well. The map became the centrepiece of one of the greatest ecclesiastical controversies in recent times: its near sale, by Sotheby’s at public auction, in 1988. This was the desperate act of the Dean and Chapter of Hereford Cathedral, who, at the time, were faced with spiralling debts. In order to secure the future of the cathedral’s other great early medieval relic, its enormous chained library, they decided to sell the map.

A basic T-O map

Uproar ensued—Sir Roy Strong called it ‘one of the most terrible and vulgar ideas I have ever come across’ (a line you suspect he might use most days about something or other). Petitions were raised, debates raged in Parliament. Like many other people, the furore made me go to Hereford to see this great medieval monster for the first time, which, considering the fact that the city was only a short, direct train ride away from where I grew up, was perhaps some kind of proof that it just wasn’t taken seriously enough, even by local map addicts. The threat of its imminent loss certainly changed that: I was one of tens of thousands of extra visitors pouring into the cathedral to view the Mappa Mundi. At the eleventh hour, a huge anonymous donation arrived in Hereford (it transpired to be from J. Paul Getty Junior), the map was withdrawn from auction and plans were mooted for a new, purpose-built centre to display and explain both the Mappa Mundi and the chained library. This opened in 1996, and it’s a splendid exhibition, offering much better presentation and interpretation of both treasures than they ever had before in their dark, dusty corners of the cathedral.

While not doubting that the Dean and Chapter were in a horrible position back in 1988, their reasoning for singling out the medieval map for disposal was deeply spurious. This boiled down to their theory that the Mappa Mundi had no intrinsic link to Hereford, a wild reinterpretation of the facts as far as they can be ascertained. Unusually for a medieval map, we can be confident of the identity of its creator, for his name is written clearly in a corner: Richard of Haldingham and Lafford, now better known as Holdingham and Sleaford in Lincolnshire. Church records show that there was one Richard de Bello working as a clergyman at Lincoln Cathedral between 1278 and 1283, and that, two decades later, there was a Canon Richard de Bello at Hereford Cathedral. It is more than likely that they were one and the same, or at least closely related, explaining the map’s early arrival at Hereford, and rather blowing apart the Dean and Chapter’s assertion. Was seven hundred years in the same place not a strong enough case to make for its retention there?

As the top of the map represents the east, where we can see both a figure of Christ and the location of Paradise, the shapeless lump representing the island of Britain can be found in the north-western corner, in the bottom left of the vellum. Tucked away on the River ‘Wie’, Hereford is printed on the map, although many theories believe it to have been a subsequent addition once it arrived in the city, for the annotation of the name is quite poor and ragged compared with that of nearby Gloucester and Worcester. Also pointing to later supplementation, the only mountains shown in Britain are the Grampians of Scotland, Snowdon in Wales and the Clee Hills in Shropshire (a modest 1,772 feet), a most unlikely triumvirate. This is thought to be another local reference, although the Clees were home to strategically important lead mines, which may have boosted their candidature for inclusion on its own. Each city name is accompanied by a pictogram of a cathedral, tower or castle; if its size and scale gives some indication of the importance of the settlement, then London is by far the most significant place, followed by Lincoln (this was drawn by a local lad, after all) and, surprisingly, Berwick-upon-Tweed and Chester. Their apparent stature is more symbolic than literal: with trouble rife in both Scotland and Wales, these border towns were given some cartographic steroids in order to be seen flexing their muscles at the troublesome neighbours.

Even were they not wedged down in a corner, Britain and Ireland would be but incidental players on the Mappa Mundi. London, for all its swagger, pales into insignificance next to Europe’s two greatest cities of the time, Paris and Rome, basking nearer the glow of the allimportant Mare Medi Terranea (‘Sea at the centre of the Earth’, or Mediterranean). Someone didn’t take too kindly to this, however, for France bears the marks of repeated scratching and scribbling: an overly patriotic verger during one dull Evensong in the Hundred Years’ War, perhaps. Prize city of all though is, inevitably, Jerusalem, depicted as a huge battlemented circle, full of turrets and doors, at the apex of the three continents and the entire map.

On a document as richly detailed, elaborate and antique as the Mappa Mundi, you would expect to find the odd tiny mistake: a mislabelled town in an obscure part of the world, a river connecting the wrong settlements, an illustrated beastie placed on the wrong continent. To find, when there are only three known continents, that two of them have been named incorrectly, is a surprise. The labels for Europe and Africa, clearly scribed in gold, are the wrong way round. Was Richard the map-maker suggesting Africa-Europe as one giant landmass to counterbalance the mighty Asia? Was he, like the creators of intricate Persian carpets, incorporating a deliberate mistake to show his own fallibility in the face of God’s perfection? Or did that part of the labelling get done on a particularly weary Monday morning?

Far more eye-catching than any of the places marked on the map, even the Holy City, are the vast range of monsters and beasts that freckle the margins and some of the land ranges. As well as the biblical images of the jaws of Hell, Adam and Eve, Noah and company in their Ark on Mount Ararat, the stable at Bethlehem and the Red Sea parting to allow the Israelites through, there are a stack of weird, and sometimes gruesome, depictions. In Asia, we see a sciapod, a human figure with a giant nine-toed foot that he is using as a parasol. Nearby are a manticora, with the body of a lion, face of a man and tail of a scorpion, a Minotaur, dragons, giants and pygmies. Over the Baltics and Russia are a selection of cannibalistic horrors, including men with dogs’ heads and two semihuman figures feasting on the flesh of their parents. The weirdest of all are reserved for Africa: human-like creatures with no heads, but eyes and mouths in their chests, or their arms sticking out of their heads, or with four eyes, or no ears and horribly deformed feet, or with sealed-up mouths or shown feeding their young to the serpents. The continent is also home to troglodytes, hermaphrodites and the deathly basilisk.

This menagerie of horrors was more than folksy superstition or innocent embellishment. It was directly inspired, as were similar adornments to Christian world maps over most of the previous millennium, by the third-century fantasist Gaius Julius Solinus, mockingly known as ‘Pliny’s Ape’ for his slavish, if selective, use of Pliny’s encyclopaedic Naturalis Historia (c.AD 77); ‘he lifted only the nonsense’ (Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps). Nonsense it may have been, ridiculous hearsay and fabrication designed only to titillate and terrify, but that suited the early Church perfectly, and the ferocious beasts of Solinus could be found on maps right up until the fourteenth century. Just as pedagogic Christian mapping had quashed earlier geographic understanding of the actual shapes and layout of the world, so it did much the same for any conception of what might be found in nature. The fact that the most horrific creatures were almost always depicted in the ‘uncivilised’ parts of the world (Africa, Asia and the far north) inculcated a fear and prejudice which took very deep root.

It’s not as if this thousand-plus-year hiatus of ignorance was an inevitability, or the best that could be made of the limited knowledge and resources available at the time. Far from it. Many cartographic truths had been established in the Graeco-Roman era, most notably by Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (c.AD 85-165), eminent mathematician, geographer and astronomer. The first of his works was the Almagest, a thirteen-book exposition of the mathematical theory behind the motions of the sun, moon and planets, whose findings were not superseded until the seventeenth century. In about AD 140, he produced the eight-book Geographia, which took the same mathematical approach in detailing the coordinates of around eight thousand places across the known world in what we would now call a system of latitude and longitude. He used his data to produce twenty-seven maps in the Geographia; none of the originals have survived, but countless cartographers have plotted them according to his exacting instructions. He knew the Earth to be spherical, worked out the problems of different projections, used meridians, parallels and grids and introduced perspective, or the idea of different scales for different maps, depending on whether these were plotting small regions congested with names and settlements or wider, less populated tracts of land. He was vehemently dismissive of the notion that the lands were entirely encircled by a mythical, heavenly ocean, calling it ‘a fallacious description, and an unfinished and foolish picture’.

If the Christian lands of Europe preferred to spend the next millennium or so in a fog of pious ignorance, the pursuit of knowledge about the shape and structure of the world, and how this could be conveyed in maps, was enthusiastically pursued elsewhere. Third-century Chinese mathematician Liu Hui developed sophisticated surveying techniques that enabled height, depth and comparative perspective to be measured and plotted. In the Islamic world, Ptolemy’s Geographia was translated into Arabic in the ninth century, and formed the basis of many new studies and maps. These were often far more accurate and detailed than Ptolemy’s raw data, for they took his theory and added their practice as explorers, missionaries and tradesmen, as well as developing contemporary skills in surveying and triangulation. It was also in the Muslim parts of the world that Ptolemy’s data was sketchiest, so they were easily able to improve on that. European cartography right up until the eighteenth century depends far more on Islamic groundwork and theory than anything produced by its own people. The size of the Earth, for example, was pretty accurately established by tenth-century Persian scholar Abu Rayhan al-Biruni six hundred years before Europeans managed to come up with the same figure.

Maps helped to define and sustain the fundaments of biblical creationism; they also played their part in finally challenging them. The literal interpretation of Creation reached its inevitable conclusion in 1650, when the Primate of All Ireland, Archbishop James Ussher, published a work stating that God had created the world on Monday 23 October 4004 BC, and, as detailed in the book of Genesis, finished it by Saturday night. Soon, this bold assertion was included in all reprints of the King James Bible and thundered from the pulpits and in schoolrooms. Into such a world came William Smith, whose lifelong obsession was to map Britain from below. Despite terrible hardships, this he finally achieved, producing the world’s most advanced geological map of the whole of England and Wales, and part of Scotland, in 1815. Proving the antiquity of the rock strata on which we live was a major leap forward into accepting and understanding the concept of evolution, over forty years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

The Renaissance had dragged Europeans up to speed in cartography as in all other branches of the arts and sciences, although it had taken a fair while for the influence to seep across the English Channel from the revolutionary continent. In British map-making, the Tudor age of the sixteenth century was particularly productive, honed from a curious mixture of greater intellectual freedom and the ruthless power struggles of Henry VIII. His break with the papacy in Rome, in order to establish the Church of England and grant himself a divorce, necessitated a far more bullish defence strategy, which he swiftly realised demanded better maps: the coasts, in particular, were surveyed and mapped with an attention to detail not seen again until the turn of the nineteenth century. Following Henry’s death in 1547, Crown and country descended into a bloody battle for political and religious supremacy, which reached an uneasy truce of sorts, eleven years and three monarchs later, on the accession of Elizabeth I.

Although Elizabeth re-established the new Protestantism as the religion of state, she strove hard to distance herself from the opposing fundamentalisms of her predecessor siblings, Edward VI and ‘Bloody’ Mary I. Despite Pope Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570, Catholics and their worship were tolerated; furthermore, the arts and sciences blossomed, the first stirrings of imperial adventure united the nation, and a new generation of maps, spearheaded by Christopher Saxton’s luxuriant county series of the 1570s, came to symbolise the confident, increasingly literate new England. In 1588, this was rocked by the thwarted invasion of the Spanish Armada and its attempt to force Catholicism back into the country. The inevitable reaction was a further uprising of anti-Catholic sentiment, both officially and among the population at large. Some fine Tudor maps display this with unblinking honesty, most notably those collected, drawn and annotated by William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-98), the lynchpin of Elizabeth’s court for all but the last few years of her long reign.

Burghley was a first-rate example of an Elizabethan map addict. From an early age, he collected plans and maps, both professionally and for pleasure. His official residence at Theobalds, near Cheshunt, was lavishly decorated with maps, charts and cosmographies, including a map of the heavens that occupied the entire ceiling of the Great Hall and incorporated an animatronic sun. He was a passionate exponent of the idea that maps could demonstrate military, economic or political landscapes more effectively, and more swiftly, than any other tool of communication. As Elizabeth’s chief courtier, he made it his job to map the location of the gentry, squires and officials of England and Wales, right down to the lowest level of authority, the Justices of the Peace, either by annotating the plans produced by Saxton or drawing his own. This intelligence-gathering occupation, described as ‘a geographical index to the government’s friends and enemies’ came into even sharper focus after the skirmish with the Armada, when Burghley painstakingly marked with a cross every Catholic and Catholic-leaning family, to be carefully watched and monitored. This was the first example of the minute mapping of religious difference for political motives, a dismal, if inevitable, trend that has survived and thrived to this day, from Belfast to Bosnia to Basra.

The turbulent swings between Protestantism and Catholicism dominated the next century of English life, and provided a covert impetus for one of our most celebrated national maps, John Ogilby’s Britannia (1675), often described as ‘the world’s first road atlas’. It is a stunningly beautiful work: a mile-by-mile strip map of the country’s seventy-three major roads, 7,500 miles of them in all. The detail was unprecedented, with villages, towns, hills, woods, commons, fords, bridges, churches, large houses and inns carefully plotted at one inch to the mile. Today, they are among the most highly valued of all collectable British maps, celebrated for their aesthetic charm and detailed portrait of every route and rut of the landscape.

It seems that there was a great deal more to them than their aestheticism and pragmatism. Recently, I took part in a BBC Wales television series, Terry Jones’ Great Map Mystery, which traced four of Ogilby’s routes across Wales. The former Python has made some terrific TV histories with author and director Alan Ereira, often unearthing new evidence that sheds light on old times, and this was no exception. Why, they pondered, was the very first map in Britannia the route between London and Aberystwyth, of all places? It’s a small enough place today, but in the seventeenth century it was a tiny, remote fishing hamlet. Close reading of the accompanying text, and examination of the details on the maps, led them to the startling conclusion that Britannia was a cartographic blueprint for a French invasion of England and Wales.

Ogilby started the volume shortly after King Charles II had signed the secret Treaty of Dover (1670) with Louis XIV of France, knowledge of which didn’t come into the public domain until 1830. Charles had grown up in France, and much admired—and desired—the absolute monarchy, rooted in Catholicism, enjoyed by the Sun King, Louis; such authority was in stark contrast with his piecemeal powers in England. The Dover treaty laid plans for Charles to declare publicly his Catholicism and for French troops to help back this with a swift invasion. Britannia supplied all the options for this invasion, indicating, for instance, that a ‘back door’ attack through Wales would be far more likely of success via Aberystwyth than the more obvious ports of Holyhead or Fishguard. Interspersed with the best potential routes for marching armies were those connecting pilgrimage shrines, another nod to the Catholic undertones of the atlas, and the location of metal mines for armaments. In the course of the series, Terry Jones interviewed Professor Ronald Hutton, eminent historian of this era, who agreed that this interpretation was significant and highly plausible.

Back in the previous century, at the same time that Lord Burghley was producing his Here Be Papists maps for the Elizabethan court, a wealthy Midlands family were doing much the same, albeit for precisely opposite reasons and in the rather more glamorous medium of heavy woollen cloth. The result was the staggeringly lovely Sheldon Tapestry Maps, still largely extant today. Ralph Sheldon and his family were devout Catholics; their two houses, at Beoley in Worcestershire and Weston Hall in Warwickshire, would have been squarely marked with a cross on Burghley’s maps, for they were well known and wealthy too. Ostensibly, the four tapestries, each about 20 × 16 feet, were woven in the late 1580s to decorate his newly built pile at Weston. Sumptuously colourful and packed with detail of the Midland counties of Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, they purport to be nothing more than a joyful celebration of both the locality and the new excitement around cartography, for much of the information (including a few mistakes) came directly from Christopher Saxton’s recently published county maps.

Loyalty to the Crown and to England is ostentatiously displayed throughout the tapestries, in copious royal crests, woven verses, decorative border flourishes and even a reproduction of the title page from a Protestant reformers’ tract. It seems, perhaps, that they were trying just a little too hard to throw cynics off the scent, for some people have declared the tapestries to be the cartographic equivalent of the priest’s hidey-holes that could be found in many local houses, most famously Harvington Hall. Large houses belonging to families of fellow Catholics feature prominently, and with some exaggeration, on the maps. Furthermore, some (most recently Robert Macfarlane in The Wild Places) have claimed that the large Catholic houses, and some smaller but easily identifiable residences, are augmented on the tapestries with a thin red thread. With the sometimes violent religious upheaval going on around them, the maps could have possibly represented potential escape routes (they are some of the first English maps to show roads) and safe houses. ‘The Armada had been only a few years earlier,’ states Richard Ovenden, keeper of special collections at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where most of the remaining tapestries can be seen. ‘Perhaps the Sheldons were hedging their bets.’

It’s a great story, although, according to Sheldon tapestry expert Dr Hilary L. Turner, it is just a story. She told me, ‘I have never quite understood the statement that the tapestry maps had a practical use in “mapping safe houses”. Practical—how? Each tapestry measured approximately sixteen feet high and twenty foot across—scarcely pocket size and a little difficult to unroll while escaping in the saddle, surely?’ She quickly demolishes the rest of the theory: ‘The link between the houses shown on the tapestries is that most of them belonged to the Catholic Sheldon family or to their friends and relatives—not that all of them were practising Catholics. Many major residences owned by other Catholic families weren’t shown at all. Robert Macfarlane’s information is also incorrect. Most buildings, whatever their function or size, were outlined by a single black thread. Red roofs, yes; the two Sheldon houses—Beoley (on the Warwickshire tapestry) and Weston (on Warwickshire and Worcestershire), together with Milcote (Warwickshire)—have short red lines dividing floor levels. Occasionally there is a red-outlined window—but on no clear sectarian division. Sorry—but the Catholic connection is not one which should be stressed.’

The bigotry that was mapped for so long as a central tenet of Christianity did all it could to put me off the Church, although I did dive headlong into a brief phase of happy-clappiness at the age of sixteen (beer, fags and men soon cured me). This momentary lapse does suggest at least a penchant for the spiritual search, and, yet again, maps came to my rescue in the shape of a growing interest in paganism. Thankfully, this didn’t really kick in until my thirties, so I’d outgrown the crushedvelvet-and-pewter-jewellery school of witchcraft before it even began. My best mate couldn’t really understand it, until one day suddenly exclaiming, ‘Oh, I see! Paganism’s really mappie, isn’t it?’

It is. Go to any pagan event or gathering, and there will be a stash of well-worn Ordnance Surveys to be seen in every battered Volvo estate and camper van in the car park. I was thrilled to find that my anorak obsession was now bathed in the uplifting glow of spirituality, for this wasn’t just idle perusal of maps and even idler ambling around the country following those maps, it was a Journey with the Ancestors to ancient Places of Power. One time, the annual weekend moot of the Society of Ley Hunters took place in a nearby village, and that was a twenty-course map banquet. Having listened to the speakers and talked with many of the participants, I galloped home to sit cross-legged on the floor with a ley guide, a pile of OS maps, a pencil and a ruler. Before my eyes, networks of lines materialised, running through tumps and forts, churches and standing stones, wells and crosses, especially in the parts of the country that I’d always been most drawn to, way before I knew my Imbolc from my elbow. I took to walking some of the ancient hollow ways and tracks, such as the Wessex Ridgeway and the Golden Road in the Preseli Mountains of Pembrokeshire. They had a definite quality that set them apart from your workaday rights of way, something more settled, solid and beyond. On the Ridgeway, I felt the feet and hooves of thousands of years by my side, heard the Babel of languages and sighs of the eternal winds. Having thought that I’d exhausted most of the possibilities of a map, it came alive in an entirely new way.

Tracing sacred landscapes, alignments and their many features has underpinned years of both my work and my leisure time. Living in the mountainous part of Wales has helped, for the landscape is so much less trashed than it is in most parts of England, despite the best efforts of the Forestry Commission. Many of the lines and tracks that Alfred Watkins identified in his seminal 1925 book about leys, The Old Straight Track, have already been lost to the plough and the bulldozer, though plenty survive. And Watkins was no tie-dyed loon, I was relieved to see. Amateur beekeeper, landscape photographer, pillar of the community, Herefordshire dry through and through, his voice barks at you off the page: ‘You must use Government Ordnance maps. One mile to the inch is the working scale. Other maps of two or four miles to the inch are quite useless, save for checking long leys.’ Amen.

Of course, paganism, in its infinite varieties, attracts the same demagogues, nutters, fundamentalists and desperadoes as any other faith system, and it’s always they that get the attention and the bad press. As a way, however, of regaining some spiritual dimension in our relationship with the land, our lore, our past and our future, it is essential, and no surprise that it’s regularly cited as the country’s ‘fastestgrowing religion’. We have lost far too much of the idea of sacred landscapes, of landscape at all, of journeying and pilgrimage, of the cycle of the year, of darkness and death in everything as well as light and life, and our societal plight only confirms it. Besides, Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales are such fine countries in which to practise a little light paganism, for there is so much to discover, in the heart of London as much as in the wilds of Connemara. Even the most unlikely places can throw up some thrilling Earth Mysteries. Even somewhere as unlikely as Milton Keynes.

Like the proverbial prophet unrecognised in its own land, Milton Keynes likes to believe that it is loved globally, but scorned—or at the very least, severely patronised—locally. There is some truth in the suspicion. Town planners and students of social architecture from Japan, China, Germany, the USA and Scandinavia, in particular, seem to revere the place and flock there regularly to admire its rectilinear precision. Some love it so much that they set up their businesses and livelihoods there. Domestically, however, Milton Keynes is invariably just a weak punchline, usually accompanied by mentions of roundabouts and concrete cows.

Britain’s New Towns are our ultimate map-born conurbations. Older settlements that had grown up along rutted routes, or where roads crossed each other, at fording or bridging points of rivers, on estuaries, nestled into strategic defence points and so on, had all evolved without any help or hindrance from cartographers: most were mapped substantially for the first time only when the Enclosure Acts came into force during the eighteenth century and every last inch of land was recorded and divvied up on huge charts between the landowners. The New Towns were conceived, incubated, born and brought up with maps as their constant nursemaids: if ancient, organic settlements were evolution and practice way before theory, the New Towns were theory only, on a vast scale, hypothesis made massive over whole swathes of post-war austerity countryside.

The main grid pattern of Milton Keynes was agreed at the tail end of the 1960s, and then it was just a matter, quite literally, of filling in the squares. MK’s grid is not as stiff as you’d often find in, say, an American city: it wavers and fluctuates across the Buckinghamshire countryside as if the whole pattern were a flag rippling gently in an English breeze. Furthermore, the alignment is wonked from a straight north-south pattern, going more south-west to north-east: so the H roads are not quite horizontal, nor V roads absolutely vertical. This slight kookiness has also led to one of MK’s strangest celebrated facts, that the whole city is aligned, like an ancient stone circle or burial chamber, to the sunrise of the summer solstice. I’d heard it said so often, but never by anyone who’d actually seen it. I had to have a look for myself.

Well, the first thing to report is that it works. Kind of. The line angled to the north-east, the location of the solstice sunrise on 21 June, runs right through the city centre. It starts at its westernmost point at Milton Keynes railway station, before passing straight up the two-mile Midsummer Boulevard, the High Street of MK, becoming a ruler-straight path that crests up to a viewpoint over Campbell Park. Rather impressively, the line then continues invisibly, right up the nave of a glorious cathedral of trees, across a roundabout (inevitably), through the Millennium stone circle and its outlying heel stone before spluttering its last on an island in the middle of the artificial Willen Lake. It’s the Asda own-brand version of the Grand Axis through Paris.

‘Very not Stonehenge’: Milton Keynes just after sunrise on the Summer Solstice

You have to hand it to them for trying. To underline the point, Midsummer Boulevard’s parallel neighbours are called Silbury and Avebury boulevards, and there’s an open-air square in the middle of the vast shopping centre that has bollards marking the position of the cardinal points of the compass and the sunsets and sunrises at midsummer and midwinter, together with a complicated sundial and accompanying explanation panels. I was trying to photograph these features when I was snapped out of my mood of all-time-is-now reverie by the arrival of a security guard. ‘What are you photographing?’ she fired at me. ‘Well, this square,’ I stuttered. ‘Why are you photographing it?’ she barked back. Something inside me died. ‘Why are you asking me?’ I whimpered. ‘Control spotted you on the CCTV and told me to come and check you out,’ she told me with that blank, hostile honesty that comes with a monogrammed polyester cap. As answers go, ones like that make me feel like vomiting, but instead I could only tell her that I was a visitor in her city, and was doing what visitors often do, namely photographing the sights on offer, even if they were as apparently few and far between as in Milton Keynes. ‘What’s there to photograph here, though?’ she rattled. ‘Well, all the stuff about the solstice alignment,’ I explained, expecting an ‘oh right’ in cheerful recognition. ‘What do you mean?’ she shot back. ‘What solstice thing?’ My answer seemed only to have made matters worse: she was now glaring at me as if I was perhaps a reconnaissance scout for the Wiccan equivalent of al-Qaeda. I explained the stuff around the square, and even took her round to show her a bit of it. Not once in the time that she’d been a security guard in that centre had she ever thought to wonder what those bollards, plaques and sundial were all about, but Control would doubtless have given her one hell of a bollocking if she’d wasted valuable teenager-taunting time getting to know her surroundings.

Milton Keynes has built these fabulously Old Religion touches into the New City, but no one knows about them, not even the locals. The day prior to the solstice, I’d tried to find the city’s tree cathedral—the exact same size, shape and layout as Norwich Cathedral: in other words, not something you can lose behind a litter bin. I knew I was in vaguely the right area, but could find no one to ask as I hovered by the side of a busy H or V road. On the other side was some nauseous confection of sub-Disneyland turrets and towers, a kiddies’ theme park that went by the name of Gulliver’s Kingdom. The car park was packed. I darted across the main road, hiked through the cars and approached the baseball-capped girl in the ticket office. She smiled mechanically. ‘I’m just trying to find the tree cathedral,’ I explained. ‘It’s near here, I think—do you know where it is?’ She didn’t, but fair play, she took me inside to ask all her colleagues. There was much head-scratching and puffing of cheeks, but no one had the faintest idea where it was. Only one of them had even heard of it. I walked back out, through hordes of disgruntled parents being ripped off for an hour of mild diversion on crummy rides and junk-food outlets staffed by sallow East Europeans. Unsure where to go next in my hunt, I paused at the entrance to the Gulliver’s Kingdom car park. Suddenly, I noticed another car park bang opposite, with the words TREE CATHEDRAL slightly faded but clearly emblazoned on the crossbar of the height barrier. And there it was, less than two hundred yards from the ticket booth of Gulliver’s Kingdom. Had the fun-loving staff there just played an elaborate wind-up on me? No offence to them, but they didn’t look able or willing. Or were their brains so fried after a day flogging overpriced tat to frenzied kids and angry parents that not one of them had ever noticed what was on the doorstep as they drove out of the car park to return to their brick box in the trees?

They should. Milton Keynes’ tree cathedral is an absolute wonder. It is beautiful: quiet, relaxing, uplifting and energising all at once. The nave is a fabulously cool avenue of hornbeam and lime trees, shadowy pines create the exterior walls, statuesque ash make up the choir and gnarly oaks the chancel. In spring and autumn, flowering crocuses nod to the effect of sunlight pouring through stained-glass windows. In fact, the only trees that bring down the whole effect are the four Californian Redwoods put in place in the middle as the four corners of the cathedral’s towering spire. They’re far from towering, though: rather more stumpy and dusty, with one slowly losing its will to stand. Although the MK tree cathedral is little more than twenty years old, it’s a great deal more impressive than the far more celebrated version, planted in the early 1930s, that can be found nearby up on Dunstable Downs. It’s just a shame that no one seems to know about it.

If most locals are cheerfully ignorant of the city’s supposed pagan design, there are numerous pagan map addicts who have wittered excitedly about the MK alignments on various websites and in Xeroxed magazines called things like Disciples of Avalon or Gaia and Higher. Never averse to getting the maps and rulers out and proving alignments even when they may not be there, some enthusiasts have detected slight kinks in the three central boulevards, in particular that they are not precisely parallel, and therefore point towards intersections miles away of some significance. Different enthusiasts and different rulers seem to produce different results however, for no one can quite agree on the location of this supposed point of power somewhere to the west of the city. Any useful feature is seized upon as corroborating evidence for these lines: proximity to a church, a mound or motte, an earthwork, a tumulus, a crossroads, an old inn, a lone tree, an ancient track, a straight track, a ford, just about anything that’s venerable or older than we are. The urge to believe, to ascribe greater significance, is overwhelming. And it’s not just the pagans who so earnestly sign up to such theories: the more psychopathic element of the evangelical Christian movement love this sort of stuff too, all the proof they need of diabolic conspiracy at work. One Christian video from the 1980s warns that the Milton Keynes alignment is an example of ‘the Earth Grid and the bizarre lattice patterns of Satan’, which makes it sound so enchanting. I hate to disabuse excitable minds on both sides, but from what I could establish in the city archives, there is no cosmic grid or Satanic lattice pattern at work in MK. The alignment came only when one planner had noticed from the map that the three central boulevards pointed north-east; this, he knew, to be the point on the compass where the summer solstice sunrise occurred. It was a useful, and novel, afterthought, rather than anything pre-planned.

I thought about catching the first rays of solstice sunshine beaming down the tree cathedral’s nave, but I decided that my best bet for a good view of the phenomenon was from the lofty viewpoint known as the Belvedere, in Campbell Park, to the east of the city centre. Trying to find some people who’d know about the city’s mystical alignment, I’d made internet contact with a pagan bikers’ group and had met them the previous evening in a village pub about twelve miles out of town. They were a grand bunch, but no one had much to say on Midsummer Boulevard and its siblings, so I just sank a few beers with them and listened to conversations about classic roads and motorbike parts. The landlord had kindly let me park my camper van in his garden, so it was a 3.30 alarm call the following morning to get me back to MK in time to witness the spectacle. None of the pagan bikers could be persuaded to get up that early (I love fair-weather pagans), but as I walked up the hill towards the Belvedere ten minutes before sunrise, I noticed a couple of figures already there. By the time the sun came up, there were nine of us witnessing it from our vantage point. It was very not Stonehenge: there was no chanting or incantation, no robes or hoods. Just nine faintly embarrassed Brits smiling politely at each other, talking about the weather and snapping every ray of the northernmost sunrise of the year with our digital cameras and mobile phones.

The ancients managed their alignments with exquisite precision: the summer sunrise (and winter sunset) at Stonehenge are mathematical in their exactness, as is the midwinter sunrise that, alone of the dawns of the year, penetrates the long chamber of the Newgrange burial mound in Ireland. The planners of Milton Keynes were a little more lackadaisical in their approach, for the sun rises a few degrees to the left (north) of the city’s grand axis and then finally hits it square on twenty or so minutes later. In the context of MK, this works all the better, for the first few, low sunbeams would never penetrate the dense lines of trees that stretch the undulating length of Midsummer Boulevard, but by the time the sun is up enough to flood the scene with its rays, it is square on the line. Having been wowed by the sunrise, I raced down to the railway station at the far western end of the axis. Half an hour after dawn, the whole, vast glass frontage was dazzling in reflected sunlight pulsing from its very core. I had expected the whole summer solstice alignment to be a bit of a joke, but it wasn’t, and the same feeling applied to the city as a whole. But then, what else would you expect from Satan’s very own lattice pattern?