Maps are more than just geography, they are as much a philosophy. How many places do you know intimately that are a reasonable distance away yet you don't know the places in between? modern transport has given us a strange disconnect when travelling that wasn't there in pre-industrial times. Mentally, we are not far away from having a kind of conscious teleportation. I don't mean physically, but motorways and highways now are so generic that we can drive for 100 miles on autopilot and forget the intervening countryside was even there.

With this in mind I sought to draw a mental map of the places close to me (chiefly the areas of West Cheshire, Gwynedd, Denbighshire, and Flintshire). In my mind I have no real perception of the lands in between my favourite places in northern Cambria , so I've just removed them. And as I don't drive anyway, I don't have a frame of reference for these places anyway.. that's why, in the map here, I have 'pulled in' the farther away places I love and gathered them together.

Do you have a mental map like this? A 'perception-projection'? What does yours look like? Try and sketch one... you may be surprised at how much you don't know of the lands you travel through.