MAN OF MAPS

Charting everything from gin distilleries to the sights of Paris, cartographer Kevin Sheehan lovingly, painstakingly creates maps the traditional way – by hand

Perhaps one day it won’t feel so fantastical to direct cars along routes suggested by satellites orbiting 12,500 miles overhead. There’s no real mystery, of course – to the scientifically minded, this most modern form of mapmaking is all perfectly explainable. No, the real puzzle is how it all began.

Kevin Sheehan studied the history of cartography to doctoral level, and even he isn’t sure. “Nothing survives before about 1290,” says Kevin. “We know maps must have been made from about 1200, but there are so many things we still don’t know about how they made them. That caught my fascination.” And how. If a love of the maps augmenting The Lord

of the Rings and The Hobbit prompted nascent cartographic fumblings in his Denver high school art class, it was academic study in Durham which induced Kevin’s move into a virtually peerless vocation: hand-drawn mapmaking. His dip pens and calligraphic nibs have mapped Paris, Venice, gin distilleries, the evocatively-named patches of sea comprising the shipping forecast, lots more; whatever takes his – or a commissioner’s – fancy. “My next big map will probably be drawn double hemisphere style, showing the wine regions of the old and new world,” he reveals.

Even without their illustrative flourishes – the winged Lion of St Mark guarding Venetian lagoons, the gaping-mouthed sea monster terrorising Rockall – the maps are striking works of art. But are aesthetics important here – should maps not be all about utility? “Even if it’s a purely functional map, aesthetics can be as simple as making sure the place names are all laid out in a clear, coherent manner. Getting all the tiny elements just right, so that none is obscuring anything else, is an art form in itself.”

And what gets lost when these elements are assembled digitally? “It’s hard to describe, but you just lose a bit of heart and soul. When it comes to the writing on a map, if every single letter looks exactly the same, the text loses an effect. Similarly, if I have a sea area I’ll draw lines running across it – they’re slightly wiggly, the ink gets thicker and thinner, and with 10,000 lines top to bottom and close together it gives an interesting effect; if you did the same thing digitally, every line exactly the same width and space apart, it wouldn’t look right. It’s the accumulation of all the imperfections that give the character.

“As useful as Google Maps and satnavs are, they don’t look very nice – they’re not something you pull up on screen just to have a look at. I think maybe people are reacting against this development, because the market for old maps is booming – many are more than four or five times the price they were 20 years ago, even allowing for inflation.”

Kevin is so dedicated to traditional methods that he has even, on occasion, cast paper aside in favour of vellum. “It took a bit of experimentation with pressure to try and get the inks to stick – it has a completely different feel to paper and the way it takes ink is very different – but overall it’s a lovely material to work with.”

The artists who worked on history’s most celebrated length of calfskin – the 20sq. ft sheet containing the Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral’s map of the known world circa 1300 – are Kevin’s cartographic heroes. “The fascination comes with trying to imagine the mindset of – primarily – the monks that were doing it,” he explains. “There are so many sources they must have pulled together – mythology, various histories written by all sorts of people – and they thought creatively enough to take all this written information and put it together in a spatial arrangement. The creative minds that must have been needed to come up with that...”

“It’s the accumulation of all the imperfections that give maps their character”