Posted by Jock on March 27, 2007 at 22:57:04 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: COMMENTS REQUESTED ON NEW MAPS PLEASE posted by Owen Roberts on March 25, 2007 at 16:38:38:
Although I was seriously tempted to wade in at an earlier stage in the development of this thread, I hesitated because I was unsure of Mike's ultimate objective in producing the SW and Broads maps. (If you are not sure of someone’s strategic objective, it's difficult to comment on the specific tactics that they choose to employ.)
In the case of the Lakes map it's more straightforward - AR has created a fictional landscape which is in a very subtle way related to a real lake and some real places in the Lake District. AR shares different aspects of this fictional landscape with us in each of the five books: SA, SD, WH, PP, PM. Mike has integrated these five views into one, giving us a richer insight into AR's fictional world than we would get by perusing just one of the endpaper maps. To use a business term this is real added value.
But in the case of SW and the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads it's not so easy to work out what Mike is trying to do. It's reasonable to ask, Where's the added value in Mike's maps? Of course, the answer could be that in drawing these maps Mike gains a better insight into the geography of these places just as Ed gains a unique insight into AR’s writing by re-typing AR’s words into his computer. But apart from catching the odd typesetting error, Ed does not set out to improve AR’s writing. How does this compare with what Mike is doing to AR’s geography?
In the case of Mike’s SW map. Mike appears to be giving us some additional details that didn’t appear in the final Swallows map, for example some drainage ditches. We might then consider this as detail that the surveyors would have seen, but chose not to map. But hold on a moment on closer inspection there’s something very curious about some of those ditches. Ah yes, look closely at Mike’s ditch on the north-east corner of Swallow Island or his other one which is about half a mile to the south-east of the savages camp on Flint Island. They follow exactly the line of the post 1953 re-aligned sea walls. So these ditches which were excavated to provide the fill material for the new sea defences would not have existed when AR made his own surveys of the area which presumably is why he did not have his fictional surveyors map them!
In the case of Mike’s Broads maps. Mike has chosen to omit some of the details (including the railway lines) that did appear on AR’s maps. Not only are the railways crucial to understanding the economy of the area they are an integral part of AR’s own knowledge of the area. He would have known that the train that he has rumbling across the bridges at Yarmouth would have started as trucks being loaded with fish on the harbour tramway. They would have then been hauled by a small shunting engine past the ‘Hole in the Wall’ and taken to the sidings at Beach goods station. Here they would have been assembled into a longer train bound for London. A powerful goods locomotive would then have taken this train across the girder bridge over the River Bure and then across the erstwhile swing bridge at the mouth of Breydon Water.
[Dear Mike, we need more railway detail, not less to make sense of Yarmouth, the Broads and all those bridges!]