Palimpsests

 

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, the rough pattern of settlement and the wealth of churches (in both senses).  Norfolk in the Middle Ages was a rich farmland where sheep were reared for the fine fleece (only surpassed in quality by Dieulacres Abbey, but that's another rabbit hole!) Turkeys were thrived and were driven to markets in London, don't think lorries, think a chap and his wife and a dog herding them! Cromer became a holiday resort and quite a few rich bankers built halls. 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.  

Through all the maps some little details stay the same giving the landscape a history, a deep sense of its own timescale. We take our little dog up the Avenue most days, it's the straight bit of lane leading to Northrepps Hall and we have a couple of pictures from 1890 showing it almost identical to now.It's a delightful walk!

 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 in the maps. 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 and will carefully consider whether the projected change is beneficial and, more importantly, for whom.

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. And in the thirteenth century, in a monastery somewhere in the Middle East run by Orthodox Christians, this fountain of mathematics, natural philosophy and logic was scraped away for a prayer book which was so unimportant it was not even cut, sewn nor bound. Ironically it is thought that the original Archimedes sheets ended up in an obscure little scriptorium to keep it safe from the marauding crusaders who destroyed anything in an unknown script as heretical.

But back to maps......I suspect, from what is happening elsewhere, the next map in the Norfolk series may be covered with solar panels while we throw away sheep's fleece and import more and more food....

Progress? I'll talk about that in my next entry........