Exploration

I am still struggling with the nuances of GIS, issues around GIS in government, geographical metadata, spatial data initiatives etc. etc.

But I can go back to historical geography and immediately understand geography as an incentive for intrepid early explorers to visit far away places and try to understand the physical world as a result.

History was about chaps, geography was about maps. And of course the chaps who drew the maps. Romantic names like Thales and Ptolemy from Greek and Roman times, then the European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries such as Vasco Da Gama, Bartholemew Dias and Ferdinand Magellan. Even their names suggested exciting and remote journeys. No doubt some were concerned about enriching themselves but at the same time they enriched our knowledge base and transformed our fragmentary gleanings into a coherent body of knowledge.

Then in the nineteenth century James Cooke and Charles Darwin excited us all over again with a further interpretation of our world and the creatures who inhabit it.

And even today there are individual explorers climbing the highest peaks, crossing the hottest deserts, sailing the roughest seas and reaching both poles. Most do not have scientific research as their main driving force, but they do remind us of the geographic and climatic variety of our planet and our need to preserve that variety.

And on television, programmes such as Coast, or Micheal Palin's travel programmes are still fascinating for us, possibly because we have been to, or aspire to go to, some of the places which are being shown.

That's the geography I understand. Something I can visualise, something I can touch. And am still surprised when I look put of an aircraft window and see the land below exactly as it is portrayed on a map.

And that is why I am excited about my forthcoming trip to the Orkney islands, my first ever visit there. It's a new adventure, a new exploration and a chance to combine History and Geography in a single place. Chaps and maps.