The British Isles...
...and other stories
“This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see; you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birthright of all, which few turn to see.” - Plotinus
You can travel further and faster in your mind than you ever will by foot, by boat or by aeroplane. That’s one of the reasons that I have always adored travel books. You can travel the world; you can travel through time. The travel books I’ve enjoyed the most, though, have not been ones about far flung places and foreign lands but ones about my own part of the world, the British Isles. Of course, I read and loved the old favourites: Celia Fiennes, Daniel Defoe, John Byng, H.V. Morton; Victor Canning, J.B. Priestley, John Hillaby, Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson but also some newer ones: Tom Chessyre, Matthew Engel, Charlie Connelly, Mark Mason, Simon Armitage, George Mahood and Peter Fiennes. They all took me to places I knew, places I thought I knew or places I might get a chance to know.
I am lucky enough to spend a lot of time travelling around the British Isles but I don’t always get to choose precisely where I go. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t get to go to places that are, in some way, special, though. Like all things in life, special is whatever you choose to make it.
Some of the places I visit are special because I knew them long ago when they and I were both a little younger and quite a bit different. Other places are special because they have some kind of connection to my family’s history. Then there are the places that seem as though they’ll be interesting because they are related not to me but to the things that interest me – mainly history and aviation. Finally, there are all the places that don’t fit into those categories, places I’ve never been to before and have had no previous interest in. They get the chance to be special because they are completely new to me. Just one of the twists of being human is that we constantly seek out both the familiar and the novel. I get to travel the length and breadth of the British Isles and so I can see whether what I remember or what I thought I had learned from travel books was really true. Okay, not always from travel books.
I was one of the first generations in Britain to be brought up by the TV and, while I probably should have been out enjoying the long, hot summers of childhood, I was generally to be found watching the telly. The world it brought to me was one I didn’t recognise; growing up, as I did, in the back streets of Salford. For instance, on my summer holidays when I was eight, on the very first day of August, the British Broadcasting Corporation would have treated me to Jeremy Kemp, who played the fictional German fighter ace Willi von Klugermann in the film The Blue Max, reading Thunder and Lightnings by Jan Mark on Jackanory. The story is about Lightning fighter jets at RAF Coltishall in Norfolk. That was followed by John Burningham, who was educated in Suffolk, going around the world in eighty days and, in this episode, travelling by biplane to New Zealand. How could I not end up living in East Anglia, mad about aeroplanes and longing to travel?
I fully accept that days spent watching TV are days you’ve pretty much lost. The memories don’t stick around in the way that memories of actually doing things might. They do sink in, though, somewhere deep. Ask me what I watched when I was eight, eighteen, forty-eight or even last week and I won’t be able to tell you. Show it me again and it will be as recognisable as an old friend. So, that day of TV in August 1977 must be in there somewhere, it must have affected me, subtly influenced my thoughts, even though I have no direct memory of it. Did I lie on my tummy, head in hands, staring up at the stories? Have I been trying to re-live them ever since? Did they shape my life? That day of programming and several thousand like it certainly fashioned my view of the British Isles. I lived in back-to-back houses, like Coronation Street, but I dreamt of leafy lanes and country churches, of coast and heath, of rolling hills and pleasant valleys. I grew up in Camberwick Green, I grew up in the village of Five Oaks with Black Beauty, I grew up in Nutwood with Rupert without ever leaving Salford. In short, the Britain I grew up in was not the Britain I grew up in.
So, now I was all grown up (at least on the outside) and travelling the length and breadth of the British Isles, it was chance to get to know it for real. See what was actually out there. I could have a real education because, as Albert Einstein said: “The only source of knowledge, is experience” and he hardly ever mentioned cats in hats. Experience, in the form of my own style of bunking off, was going to be my education. But first I wanted to discover some of the things about the place where I lived which I hadn’t been told, or I had failed to listen to, in school. First there was the name: The British Isles, what did that actually mean?
You might think that’s fairly obvious and that I’d have known the answer if I’d paid attention in Mr. Basford’s Geography class and turned up for the exam but you’d be as wrong as the mid-eighties hairdresser who told Donald Trump that he had a good idea for covering that bald spot. Mr. Basford never told us because Mr. Basford did not know. And I know that he didn’t know because no-one really seems to know.
Of course, there is the mainland of England, Wales and Scotland and there’s the big island called, perhaps not too imaginatively, Ireland. That’s not many isles though, is it? Two. Okay, well, there’s the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, Anglesey, the Orkneys, Hebrides and Shetlands. So, perhaps two dozen. When you add in the little ones you don’t know about there could be, maybe, fifty. Well, that’s a fair number, that must be the British Isles. Or is it? After so long ignoring Geography, it was finally time to start paying attention and see what I could find out.
The Royal Geographical Society, which includes the Institute of British Geographers, was founded in 1830 to promote the advancement of geographical knowledge. It is based in an imposing Victorian red-brick edifice just round the corner from the Royal Albert Hall in London. This seemed like the perfect place to find out just how many islands I was dealing with. However, this was not the case. Not only has the learned Society not actually got round to counting how many islands there are in the British Isles; it hasn’t even yet decided how big something has to be in order to be called an island. And Mr. Basford said that I wasn’t paying attention. They’ve had the best part of two centuries to come up with those two answers, which, I would say, are pretty central to British geography, and they haven’t managed it.
I think if I was a British geographer, they’d be somewhere high up on the agenda for the first meeting. They are pretty much the first two things I’d like to get cleared up: what is an isle and how many of them are British? But they hadn’t answered either question. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one not really concentrating in geography. They haven’t even had to think of excuses for why they haven’t done Chemistry homework or develop new ways to get out of PE or spend time staring at Donna Wallace’s seemingly ever-expanding breasts. What have they been up to?
Having given up on the geographers and their theories I turned to those with practical experience, instead: the Ordnance Survey. They make the most accurate and, to me at least, stunningly beautiful maps in the world. I can enjoy visiting an Ordnance Survey map of an area almost as much as I enjoy visiting the area, more if it’s Luton. I have quite a few Ordnance Survey maps, even some very out of date ones which aren’t much use at all. I also carry round with me a little handheld GPS which has OS maps of the entire British Isles in its memory – which seems like a miracle to me. So, I have a great deal of time and respect for the men and women of the Ordnance Survey. When it comes to counting the islands that make up this nation, they have at least given it a go; they say that there are 6289 islands in the British Isles.
Whoa, back up there Tonto. How many? More than six thousand? Alright, show me the map. When pushed the Ordnance Survey admit that they’ve only mapped 803 on their big digital maps. Now, they’ve been in operation longer than the geographers, having their origins in the mapping of Scotland following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. They kicked off their mapping of the rest of the country in 1791, as we’ll see later. So, what have they been doing with their time? It appears to have taken them fourteen weeks per island, meaning that they’ll need another 1,500 years to finish the job and that’s if they haven’t – and I very much suspect this might be the case – started with the easy ones. Anyway, that means the best guess is somewhere between eight hundred islands and six and a half thousand. Rather more than I thought.
The British Isles haven’t even been the British Isles for most of their history. Because we are human and our lives, as Ferris Bueller pointed out, flash past in an instant, we tend to think that anything which has been more or less the same during our lifetimes and that of our parents must just be the natural order of the world. Of course, as with many things in life, we often know that’s not true but we still feel as though it is and it is the stories we tell about those things that seem to make them permanent and enduring. The stories then seem worth defending, worth fighting for and, for some, worth dying for. They aren’t, they’re just stories but pretty much our entire life is made up of stories. That’s certainly true of wherever you live and definitely true of the British Isles.
Learn more about what the British Isles have been up to for the last four and a half billion years in next week’s post.
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I can already foresee the (futile) argument with the quizmaster at the local club over whether he's asking for mapped islands or believed islands....