Fans of Ordnance Survey maps – particularly the 204 of the classic Landranger series that cover Britain – spend hours looking for oddities. Two neighbouring, separate villages, both called ‘Great Totham’ in Essex, for instance (map 178). Or a strange dry ‘aerial river’ snaking from Littleport to Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire (map 143). Or the names hidden in the cliff shading of the Isle of Wight (map 196) – who are Rob, Bill, Liz, Mike, Trev and Kelly?
One challenge exercising many a mapgazer is finding a blank square among the 320,000 on the Landranger series: a 1km block with absolutely nothing in it except white space. The dullest section of the entire island of Britain. No contour lines, no watercourses, no buildings, no glass structure or heliport, no wood coniferous or non-coniferous, no church or place of worship with or without tower. Nothing.
Well, the nearest approach to this is on map 112 at grid reference SE830220 at Ousefleet, in the East Riding, on the secluded south bank of the Ouse east of Goole. Apart from a glancing traverse of an electricity line down at the far southwest corner, and some encroachment of the letters of ‘Ousefleet’, it’s a point-of-interest void. Yay! Yorkshire wins again! We are officially the most boring part of the country!
I cycled there on this beautiful, cloudless spring day. Coming in to Ousefleet, the skyline is dominated by a lighthouse, the most abruptly vertical thing for miles. (The shifting sands of the Ouse/ Trent/ Humber junction are treacherous, as the recent grounding of a container ship shows.)
Shortly after, down a side lane, was the sight I had come to see. Of which, clearly, there isn’t much. No footpath or bridleway crosses the Empty Square – obviously, or it would appear on the map – so you have to go down the road to the side and then walk your bike along the side of a field or two. It’s fairly well-trodden: I’m not the first to come here.
It may be shorter on things to marvel at than, say, Monument Valley or the Taj Mahal, but I rather enjoyed the austere sweep of it all on this glorious day. Fathomless blue sky, crossed by those electric cables. A couple of bare trees. Ploughed brown earth the colour of, er, a 1990s Dawes Galaxy. Low hills of Lincolnshire on the eastern horizon. But otherwise, just me and the breeze whispering to me. Words like ‘hungry… lunch… sandwich…’.
The emptiness is all an artefact of scale. At the next level of detail, in the larger-scale Pathfinder series, this area is criss-crossed by blue lines of drainage ditches, like a cracked glaze.
My mind cleared by this mindful visit to the Zen Square, the most peaceful quadrant on the entire OS map series, I carried on to something which, in comparison, was a hectic assault on the senses: Scunthorpe.