About

I was born in Redruth in 1968, the daughter of a postman who knew where every benchmark on his round was and would stop, on Sundays, to show me them. That’s thirty-eight metres, he would say, tapping the wall of the bank with his finger, as if it were a secret. I think it was the first time I understood that the ground had numbers in it.

From 1991 to 2014 I worked for the Ordnance Survey in Southampton. I started as a trainee draughtsperson, cutting contours by hand into coated film, and spent the second half of my time in the names section, deciding how places were spelled and, once in a while, driving a long way to stand in a field and ask somebody what it was called. When the Survey offered voluntary redundancy, I took it, and moved to Newlyn, which is the place every height in Britain is measured from. I’ll let you decide whether that was a coincidence.

I write essays about maps, place names, edges, and what the map leaves out. They have appeared in a handful of magazines whose editors were kind enough not to ask me to make them shorter. A collection, Nothing Shown: Essays from the Edge of the Sheet, is due from Wrack Line Books in the spring of 2027.

Why Benchmarks

A benchmark is a small mark cut into a wall: a horizontal bar above a broad arrow. It means here, exactly here, is this far above the sea at Newlyn. There are tens of thousands of them all over the country, on churches and bridges and the corners of banks, at about knee height, and almost nobody notices them any more. The Survey stopped looking after them decades ago, and they are wearing away quietly, one rainstorm at a time.

I like them because they are modest and exact, which is what I would like these essays to be. Each one tries to say: here is a thing I noticed, and here is exactly where I was standing when I noticed it.

Writing to me

I publish slowly, four or five essays a year, and there is no newsletter, no comments, and no algorithm. If you’d like to know when something new is here, there is an RSS feed, which is the nearest thing the internet has to a benchmark: old, plain, and still exactly where it was.

Letters are welcome, and answered, eventually. You can write to me at [email protected], or, if you prefer paper, to the Old Net Loft, Newlyn, which the postman assures me is enough.

Nell Penhallow
Newlyn, thirty-one metres above the zero