A palimpsest is a document, usually written on vellum, that has been scrubbed off so that another document may be written on the same vellum. The rub (sorry) is that the previous document is never completely effaced and traces of it remain, especially the guidelines.
These three maps are about 240 years apart with the middle one about 120 years ago. For me, what shines through is the basic consistency in routes in and out of Cromer and the rough pattern of settlement. A railway came and went, and the coastline subtly changed as coastlines do. In the twenty years I've been here I've seen many cliffslips and the odd precarious house tumble. Maps, like palimpsests, show changes in values: when does an arable field become a housing estate? And when does a railway become a footpath? It's all here. What isn't as clear is the underlying motivation for this change.
I guess we who were born in the sixties believed in progress as the underlying driver of change. In my Technical School it was very much taken for granted; by rational scientific thought and good engineering and architecture we could and would build a better world. Now, I'm not so sure. Humans are complicated creatures who think they are fundamentally rational but here's a thing.
It's a genuine, medieval palimpsest. It was made, as you know, by scraping an existing document off the vellum to be able to write a new document. Please bear in mind that this is before printing (unless you are Chinese) when every document was the product of painstaking copying in scriptoria.
The uppermost document, the darker script, is a prayer book. The work that has been diligently scraped and rubbed away is mathematical text by Archimedes, written in the third century BCE and copied possibly in the tenth century. It is a groundbreaking piece of work showing some understanding of what became the calculus of Newton and Leibniz as well as advanced geometry and mechanics. It is the only way we have access to Archimedes' thought.
Progress? I'll talk about this in my next entry........
