A GUIDE TO BEING CURIOUS
THIS ISSUE TAKES a tour of wonderfully mind-boggling places from Cornwall to Scotland, but curiosities are woven into every inch of Britain and there’s particular fun in unearthing ones near home.
Wikipedia is a great place to start, especially the map view which drops pins at every point of note – available on the smartphone app, or try
wiki-maps.com. We’re huge fans of
Geograph (geograph.org.uk) which crowdsources photos of every grid square in Britain. Many contributors add interesting notes so you can read about, as well as see, what’s out there to explore.
Your trusty Ordnance Survey map is always worth a closer study: once we know a place we barely open it, but a trawl for blue symbols can flag up historic sites and nature reserves you never knew about.
And there’s a treasure trove of differently-themed maps online.
DEFRA’s Magic Map (magic.defra. gov.uk) shows sites designated for natural or historical interest, like Scheduled Monuments and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. The full citation tells you what makes them special, and for the latter, what rare species to look for.
The National Library of Scotland has historic maps (maps.nls.uk) so you can see what your world used to look like. The British Geological
Society (bgs.ac.uk) has a map detailing the rock beneath your boots, so you can delve into the incredible story that brought it there.
Flying over your neighbourhood with Google Maps’ aerial view unveils curious things you’d never spot with earthbound eyes, and LIDAR Finder
(lidarfinder.com) goes one better, using light detection and ranging technology to detect intricate ground detail and hidden sites of archaeological interest. ARCHI
(archiuk.com, basic search free, small monthly fee for detail) logs and maps local finds from mesolithic scrapers to medieval villages.
Or you could visit that local museum you’ve walked past a million times (or its website until it reopens), read every info and notice board you see, go into your nearest church and explore its graveyard: last month’s #minichallenge9 shows there’s a story behind every name. Local history groups and neighbourhood forums will throw up unexpected tales, as can the British Newspaper Archive (small monthly fee or via your local library).
And of course, you can just walk and look. Lockdown has meant treading the same routes over and over, but there’s no better way to unearth the really unusual than when there’s no large-scale novelty to distract you. So keep exploring, chase every spark of curiosity, and you never know what you might find.
‘Curiosities are woven into every inch of Britain and there’s particular fun in unearthing them close to home.’