This month is all about making curtains and thinking about maps. My elder daughter has just moved house, and of course I said I would curtain it for her. Fortunately the windows were all nice cottagey sized windows, so manageable. The three grandsons were allowed to choose the material for their own rooms, and I steeled myself for either footballers, dinosaurs or super-heros, and was pleasantly surprised when they chose material with maps on it, each different, but the same theme. Then I had a deadline to get all the bedroom curtains made for the moving-in day, and am still working on some of the other rooms. Of course I have had an assistant to help me at every part of the construction process. Here he is helping me measure. "If this is supposed to be a map, how come I'm lost?" This is what happened when I walked out of the room for a minute .... This rather gorgeous material was for a bay window and took me one day to carefully cut out and two whole days to make. There was hardly enough left to make a pocket handkerchief (I'm very frugal) but have been inventive in making cushions. But whilst I was sewing geographical maps, and pirate maps and explorers' maps into curtains it gave me lots of time to think about maps. Their uses and purposes. Not always what you would think. Maps tell us about history, language, people. Names of places change. This is from a school atlas, still backed in brown paper. At the top is the German Empire, Austria Hungarian Empire, and the Turkish Empire straddling Europe and the Middle East and north Africa, then all the bits of Africa colonised by European countries, with Cape Colony at the bottom. How things change. I love old maps, and even an Ordnance Survey map can tell you about all kind of things that have now disappeared. Find an old OS map and it will point out to you all the Churches, Chapels, Post Offices, Public Houses etc in our rural villages now lost and gone forever. Telephone boxes, rural railway lines, they were all surveyed and recorded, and so an old OS map is a valuable historical document. This one has a ferry across the river Swale at Maunby, and shows the Great North Road going right through the middle of Catterick. At this moment the Catterick bypass, opened in the 1960s, is being upgraded to a motorway and has redrawn the map and reconfigured the landscape yet again. Maps were not made for travelling. They had many other purposes. If you were going on a journey in the past, you would consult a Road Book, which gave you a list of the places you would pass through and the distances between. Here are examples from Paterson's Book of Roads 1808. As well as directions and distances between each place and the cumulative distance, interesting facts about local gentry and country seats and things to look out for. Maps were used for other reasons, noting who owned what land, taxable property, borders. This looks a boring bit of map, and it is only a snip from a Tithe Map, the numbers were references to a Schedule which named the owner, occupier, use of land, rent valuation and tithes to be paid. However, I can identify that the field at the top, 14, was called The Six Acre, 115 was The Gath which had a good hill for sledging, 113 was The Pond Field, 116 The Meadow, 112 was The Cow Pasture (where pewits nested and sometimes curlews), 111 was The Field Below the Cow Pasture. Not all the land in this parish was titheable as historically some had belonged to the Church, it had been purchased by the Queens Anne's Bounty to augment the stipend of poor curates, and some as Glebe. Fields which had no tithes were not drawn in. Maps can also tell you about what might have been. This is a plan or a map of the proposed railway that never happened, showing the line going through Coverdale. There were many schemes which never got approval, or did not have enough revenue, and the maps languish in the depths of archives. Maps are also interesting in terms of etymology, the origins of words used as place names. An excellent book on this subject is Place Names in the landscape by Margaret Gelling. The names of places tell us about the language the people spoke who gave them their names. This varied over time and over the country. Some places have the same name in several languages. Semerwater in the Yorkshire Dales means water water water - sea, mere, water. And as surnames developed some people were named after the place they came from, Locative Surnames. The Archer Surname Atlas is a mapping tool which creates maps from surnames that appeared in the 1881 census. This shows the geographical location of all the people with the surname THIRSK in 1881. Thirsk is a small market town in the North Riding of Yorkshire, very few people had this as a surname, only 252, and most lived in the East Riding of Yorkshire with 20 in the West Riding and 27 in Lancashire. image from Archer's Surname Atlas. Some surnames are derived from features in the landscape, and again reflect the language of early settlers or invaders. These surnames are called Toponymics and are names such as Brook, Hill, Ford etc. But the same landscape feature can have different names in different parts of the country, so mapping where the people live who have these names is interesting. Brook and Beck mean the same thing, a small watercourse, hills, fells, downs, the name depends upon where you are. Both these names mean a small ravine. Gill comes from Norse and is used in areas occupied by Vikings, Clough in the north Midlands, parts of south Yorkshire, and is Middle English in origin. A small ravine can also be a dene, a dell, a coomb or cwm, a glen and perhaps other variations in dialect. So again, my month has been dominated by the sewing machine, but has led my thoughts in many directions. And to keep you up to date, I have made black-out curtain linings for our bedroom, took down the curtains, took out the existing linings and put in black-out linings and re-hung curtains. It has made a huge difference. And I am busy quilting in my spare time.
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AuthorThis is where you can share creativity with me. I believe that everyone has something creative within them, and it is a joy to find ways of being creative. Blogging is NEW to me, so here goes ..... Archives
January 2024
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