Myth Maps in Snibston; the story so far

Two fantastic walks have been completed to Snibston with family groups.  Thank you to all the Intrepid Explorers:  the Paines, the Bishops, the Petersons, the Rawsons and the Wheelers, for coming with me and bringing these walks alive!  Thanks also to Maurice and Esale for joining us, and to Snibston for making us so welcome.

Working drawing

My idea for Myth Maps is to look at how maps can tell tales about places and the meaning of places.  I am interested in how places build up layers of meaning over time, and those meanings can become intermingled, stories can be distorted through whispers or tales that are guessed at, overheard and passed on as fact.  Thus myths are created about the places that we inhabit and visit.

For Myth Maps I will map the walks that we took, not just the route we followed but the people who were with me (the Intrepid Explorers!), what they said, the tales we told, the dreams we dreamt, what happened on that particular walk on that particular day with that particular group.  The myths we made.

Walk 1 in February started at St Mary's Lane where Leicester Road meets Standard Hill.  Following footpaths across the fields, we looked for "treasure", listened to the sounds, and responded to the shapes of the land by running, jumping and climbing.

The walk took on a surreal, dreamlike quality, children finding delight in small, strange things they discovered, that seemed out of place and time.

They climbed trees and dug at the sides of fields, making up stories about magical lands and the King of the Forest.

My first map is called A Map of the Real and Surreal.

A Map of the Real and Surreal:  work in progress

Detail

Walk 2 started in Ravenstone at Woodstone School, a new school by new houses and next to a host of young trees still being planted into a new woodland.

Ravenstone to Snibston:  work in progress

Crossing through a newly made park full of mounds and mole hills, we then zigzagged through Ravenstone and into a playing field, down an old green lane and onto Church Lane, lined with 19th century houses.

Back across a field and up the steep hill where suddenly we saw Snibston below us, and the children raced down the hill to get there!

This walk seemed to take on the theme of different times overlapping and connecting, the old, new and the yet to come.  Each space we passed through had its own sound, its own atmosphere.  Some places had a sense that somebody had just been there - fresh animal tracks, the marks of footballers' boot studs.

An archeaological dig?

I have long had a feeling that Snibston as a place is where the past, present and future co-exist.  When I asked Jack, one of the boys on the second walk, where he thought the oldest place on our walk had been, he said "Snibston".  When I asked him where was the newest place, he thought for a while and then said "Snibston" again!  And he's exactly right!

The final walk is on Sunday, starting from Belvoirdale School in Coalville.

the eutechnical and chance-maps

I've taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography....As Emile Durkheim observed, a society's space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I'd appeared stark naked with a peacock's tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.

So wrote Will Self in his psychogeography column.

Image from The Journey public art project with Highfields School, Jo Dacombe

I have been revisiting his writing and lectures, and am rather taken with what he terms "Eutechnical" modes of travel - that is, the experience of travel anywhere before the machine took over (in about 1842, he says, when Stevenson's Rocket changed everything), which was a physical, bodily experience - in other words, walking.  Your body felt the physical effort of travelling, your muscles told you how far you had gone and if it had been uphill... in Self's view our non-eutechnical era of mechanised transport has divorced us from the physical experience of travelling.

...and so to our project, Undiscovered Networks.  What Carole and I are attempting to do is a weird fusion of the "derive" or "drift" of the French Situationists with a pre-mapped route of the railway:  but by selecting random places on the network, we are subverting the planned and scheduled function of the railway and trying to find an element of chance within it.  In the same way we are putting together two opposing notions:  the mechanised travel of the railway, which dissolves the awareness of distance travelled by doing it so quickly, but at the same time we are trying to make the experience an eotechnical or psychogeographic one, being more physically aware of what the experience of train travel will be and what will we find once we get to our randomly selected destinations....

The undiscovered element of the project is to see how all these opposing concepts will play out as we travel around and interact with places and their people.

Image from Thinkspace project, Kingswood, Jo Dacombe

...does anybody remember the game Dungeons and Dragons?  I think I was about 13 or 14 when it was a sudden craze, so sometime in the mid 80's.  The craze was mostly driven by the fantasy element - you had to imagine yourself as an elfin or dwarf-like character with special magical powers... however it wasn't the fantasy element that fascinated me.  It was the maps.

You had to travel through an imaginary world and map it as you went along.  This world only existed in your head and was built by the shake of a dice - each time you travelled north, south, east or west, you shook the dice to determine what the next piece of terrain would look like.  I remember spending hours drawing out these maps bit by bit, imagining the terrain, what I could see on each horizon, how to decide which way to travel next.  There was even an instance where if you shook a certain number the game would instruct that you had become disorientated and you would find the map you had drawn was wrong and you had to redraw it.

Map of a walk onto unmapped land, Paths of Desire project, Priors Hall, Jo Dacombe

This is what fascinated me about the game when I was 14, the exploration and discovery, the randomness of it... and that is what I still like about walking through unknown places and looking at maps of undiscovered sites.