Benchmarks: essays by Nell Penhallow

Nothing Shown

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

There is a square on the map near my house where nothing happens.

It is a kilometre by a kilometre, a single box of the grid on the Land’s End sheet, and if you look at it you will see almost nothing at all. A few contours, gentle and far apart, wandering across it as if they had somewhere better to be. The little tufted symbol for rough grassland, scattered about like seeds. A dashed line where a parish boundary runs through. One small black dot near the top corner with a height beside it. That is all. No roads. No buildings. No names except the one for the common, printed across it in thin, spaced capitals, which takes up most of the room.

I have been looking at that square for years. Last month, on a Tuesday, I went and sat in it from nine in the morning until the light went, to find out what it had left out.

I should say what I expected, because I was wrong. I expected to be bored, slightly, and to write something wry about the virtues of boredom. I took a flask and a folding stool and a notebook and the map, and a sandwich, and a second sandwich, because I know myself.

What I wrote down, over the course of the day, in the order I wrote it:

A wren, very close, very cross. The wind, from the west, smelling of the sea though I could not see it. A plastic feed sack, blue, caught in the gorse, with the name of a merchant in Hayle on it. A stone with a groove worn in it that might have been a gatepost once. Bracken, browning at the edges. Two buzzards, mewing at each other over the ridge. A path, which was not on the map, and which went from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular with great confidence. A sheep’s jawbone, very white. A low curving bank, almost lost in the heather, which I walked along and found came back round to where it started: a circle about the size of my kitchen. Somebody’s house, probably, three thousand years ago. Small yellow flowers I could not name. More of the wind.1It was tormentil, I found out later, from a book. I am bad at flowers. The Survey did not map flowers, and I have used this as an excuse for thirty-five years.

At around two, a man came over the ridge with a spaniel and asked if I was all right. I said I was. He asked if I was lost, which was fair; I was a woman of fifty-eight sitting on a stool in the middle of a moor with a map on her knees. I said no, I knew exactly where I was. I just didn’t know what was here. He thought about that for a moment, and then he told me that the bank I had found was where his grandfather used to say the piskies danced, and that you weren’t to sit inside it after dark, and that the path went to a spring that had dried up in the seventies but that the sheep still remembered. Then he went on, and the spaniel went on, and I wrote all of that down too.

There is a phrase on some maps, printed in the middle of the places nobody has surveyed, or nobody could: nothing shown. Or no data, or unsurveyed, or, on the very old charts, nothing at all, just the white of the paper. People like to say that the old mapmakers filled those spaces with sea monsters, and occasionally they did, but mostly they left them honestly empty. I think about those blanks a good deal. I spent my working life making sure there were fewer of them.

But I had never really thought about the other kind of blank: the square that has been surveyed, carefully, by people who knew what they were doing, and which has been found to contain nothing worth a symbol. That square is not empty because nobody looked. It is empty because somebody looked and decided, reasonably, that a wren, a feed sack, a jawbone, a dried-up spring, a dance floor for piskies and a man’s grandfather were not the kind of thing a map is for.

They were right. I would have made the same decision. I did make it, thousands of times, at a desk, about squares just like this one. And I don’t regret it, exactly; a map that held all of that would be the size of the moor. But I spent a whole day in one of my own decisions, and found it was crowded.

My mother, towards the end, lost the names of things first. Not the things themselves. She could make tea perfectly well; she just could not tell you that it was called a kettle. She would point at it, and frown, and say the, the, and then give up and make the tea anyway, with the same small, exact movements she had always made. The names went, one by one, like the lights going off in a street. The kettle stayed. The garden stayed, and the way to the shop, and the shape of my face. It was as if the map had been taken away and she was left, quite calmly, with the ground.

I thought about her a great deal on the Tuesday. I thought: this is what it is like, a square with nothing shown. Not nothing. Just nothing that has been written down.

At about half past seven the light went orange and then grey, and the wind dropped, and the wren came back for a final complaint. I packed up my stool. I did not sit in the circle. I walked home in the dusk across the empty square, which was full, and when I got in I took the map down from the shelf and found the place and looked at it for a long time, at its gentle contours and its little tufts of grass and its one spot height, and I didn’t add anything. I just knew, now, what it wasn’t saying. That seems to me to be most of what it means to know a place.

Drawing the Hill

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The first hill I ever drew was in the Cairngorms, and I drew it for about four months, most days, from a desk in Southampton with a strip light humming over it and a view of the car park.

This was 1991, and the Survey was in the long, strange middle of turning from ink into numbers. Some of the work was already on screens. But trainees still learned the old way, on the principle that you should understand a line before you are allowed to let a machine draw one, and the old way was scribing.

You were given a sheet of clear polyester film with a soft, opaque coating on it, a sort of dried brownish varnish. Under it, on a light table, you laid the compilation, the surveyed points and the rough lines you were to follow. And then you took the scriber, a little three-legged stand with a point in the middle of it, sapphire for the fine work, and you cut through the coating along the line. Not drew. Cut. You were taking away the dark to let the light through, so that what you made was a negative: a sheet of brown with hairlines of clear in it, which would later be used to make a printing plate.1If you made a mistake you painted over it with an opaque fluid and cut it again. Everybody’s first sheets were mottled with little dark scabs where they had done this. Mine were a disgrace.

The scriber held the point exactly upright and exactly at one depth, so the line came out at exactly one width. Your job was only to steer. It sounds easy, and it is the hardest thing I have ever done with my hands.

A contour line is a strange thing to spend four months with. It joins all the points on the ground that are at the same height. That’s the definition, and it is perfectly clear, and it is also slightly mad, because there is no such line. Nothing on the hill marks it. You could walk along the 400-metre contour of a mountain for a whole afternoon and never see a sign of it: not a change in the grass, not a path, not anything.

The way I came to think of it, bent over that light table, was as a tideline. If the sea rose until it was four hundred metres deep, this is where it would stop. It would lap at the hill exactly here, along this impossible, wriggling edge, in and out of every gully, round every spur, and the line I was cutting was the mark it would leave. Each contour is a flood. A map of a hill is a hundred floods drawn on top of each other, ten metres apart.

There are rules. A contour never crosses another one, because no point can be two heights at once. A contour never stops, except at the edge of the sheet, because the flood has to go all the way round. Close together means steep; far apart means gentle. Every fifth line is heavier, the index contour, and carries its height written into a little break in it, the figures always facing uphill, so that you can tell at a glance which way the ground is going.2The figures face uphill so that the tops of the numbers point to the top of the hill. I have never found out who decided this, and I have loved them for it for thirty-five years.

My hill was a rounded thing, steep on one side and long and gentle on the other, with a cairn on top and a forest round its feet and a loch at the bottom. I cut it, and was told it was wrong, and cut it again. I learned that my hand pulled slightly to the left on a long curve, and that I held my breath on tight bends, and that you cannot scribe a good line if you have had an argument that morning. I learned the shape of it so well that I could have drawn it with my eyes shut, and I think sometimes I did, in bed.

I had never seen it. It was a shape, a set of floods, a name in Gaelic that I could not pronounce. Meall a’ Bhuachaille: the hill of the herdsman. Eight hundred and ten metres.

Last August I went to stand on it.

I took the sleeper as far as Aviemore and a bus to the end of the road by the loch, and walked up through the pines in a thin rain that couldn’t decide what it was doing. I hadn’t told anybody why I was going, except the man in the next bunk on the train, who asked, and who looked at me afterwards with great kindness, as at someone who has explained that they are travelling six hundred miles to visit a drawing.

It was nothing like the map, of course. The map never is. There was heather, and loose stones, and a family from Leeds with a dog in a little coat, and a wind on the top that took my breath. The forest was further down than I had thought it would be. The loch was a different colour from any blue I had imagined in that car park in 1991: a dull, pewtery, moving colour, with the cloud on it.

And yet. Going up, on the steep side, I found I was counting. Not deliberately. Somewhere in my legs, I knew where the lines were. Here the ground tightened and I thought: they’re bunching up, and they were, I could feel it, the floods packing close. Here it eased, and they spread apart, and I could breathe again. Somewhere near the top, on the long gentle shoulder, I knew without looking that I had crossed an index line, the heavy one, with its little figure facing uphill, and I laughed out loud, and the dog in the coat barked at me.

I sat by the cairn for a while in the wind and ate a cheese sandwich. I thought about how much of my life had been spent drawing places I would never go, on behalf of people who would; and how the drawing had gone into me so far that it was waiting for me here, at eight hundred and ten metres, thirty-five years later, like a thing I had left in a coat pocket.

People sometimes say that a map is not the territory, and they say it as if it is a criticism of maps. It is true. The line is not on the hill. But I’m no longer sure the line is only on the paper, either. I think it is in the people who have learned to read it, the way music is in the people who have learned to hear it. You walk up a hill you have only ever drawn, and the floods rise round you, one by one, ten metres at a time, and you know exactly where you are.

Pity Me, and Other Places

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:00:00 GMT

There is a village in County Durham called Pity Me. There is a parish in Somerset called Nempnett Thrubwell. There is a town in Devon called Westward Ho!, with the exclamation mark, which it was named after a novel and has had to live up to ever since. I knew all of these before I worked in names, the way everybody knows them, as small jokes the country tells about itself. I did not know, until I started, that every one of them had been written down, at some point, by a person whose job it was to make sure it was spelled right.

For eleven years, that person was sometimes me.

The Survey has always cared about names. In the early days, the surveyors kept Name Books: great ledgers in which every name on the sheet was written out, with its spelling, a description of the thing it named, and, crucially, its authorities, the people who had been asked. The vicar. The landowner. The schoolmaster. An old man at the mill. If the authorities disagreed, which they often did, the disagreement went into the book as well, and somebody somewhere had to decide.1Some of the old Name Books have been digitised. If you ever need to lose an afternoon, look up a village you know and see who was asked about it in 1850-something, and what they said.

By the time I joined the names section, the ledgers were long gone and most of the work was at a desk, checking, correcting, cross-referencing. But now and again a name was disputed badly enough that somebody had to go and stand in the place and ask, and because I was the one who had once complained about never being sent anywhere, it was often me.

What I learned, very quickly, is that a place does not have a name. It has a cloud of them.

The first time I was sent out properly was to a farm in West Penwith, not far from where I live now. The sheet showed one of the farm’s fields with a name, and a letter had arrived saying the name was wrong. I drove down, and the farmer walked me out to the field, and we stood in it, and I asked what it was called.

He looked at it for a while, as if it might tell him. Then he said that his father had called it Gweal Gwyns, the windy field, and his wife called it the top field, and his son called it the one with the gate that doesn’t shut, and the man who rented it for sheep called it Number Four. “So what do you want to know?” he said. “What it’s called, or what it’s called by me?”

I didn’t have an answer. I wrote all of them down, which is what you do when you don’t have an answer, and drove back to Southampton with five names for one field and the slightly giddy feeling that I had been let in on something.

The map, of course, could only take one. It took Gweal Gwyns, because it was the oldest and the most widely known and because it was already there, and because the letter-writer turned out to be a neighbour with a long-running grievance about the gate. But the other four didn’t stop existing because the map declined them. They went on living exactly where they had always lived, which is in people’s mouths.

Here in Cornwall the names come with their own grammar. There is an old rhyme, By Tre, Pol and Pen, shall ye know the Cornishmen, and it is more or less true. Tre is a farmstead or a settlement; pol is a pool; pen is a head, an end, a top. Half the places round here are a small description of themselves in a language that stopped being spoken at the kitchen table a long time ago. Chyandour, the house by the water. Porthcurno, the cove of the horns. Penzance, the holy headland. You can walk around West Penwith reading the landscape back to itself.2Mousehole, two miles down the road, is pronounced Mowzel, and if you say it any other way people will be kind to you in a way that makes it clear they have noticed.

My own name is one of them. Pen and hallow: the head of the moor, or the end of it, depending on whom you ask. Somebody, five or six hundred years ago, lived at the top of some rough ground, and was called after it, and the name came loose from the place and wandered off down the generations until it ended up in a desk drawer in Southampton on a pass card. I have been to the moor. There is nothing there now; there was probably very little there then. It is strange and pleasant to find yourself named after a view.

I don’t think I understood, until I was out of the job, how much of the work was choosing. Every name on a map is a winner. It beat the other names in the cloud, for reasons that were sometimes good and sometimes merely administrative, and once it was printed it acquired a kind of authority it hadn’t had before. People started using it because it was on the map. Visitors used it, then estate agents, then the council. The cloud thinned. Sometimes I suspect that we didn’t so much record names as finish them off.

So these days I collect the losers. I keep a notebook, an actual paper one, of the names round here that will never make a sheet: the bench on the harbour wall that everybody calls Ivy’s, though nobody I’ve asked remembers an Ivy; the slipway the children call the Drop; the bend in the coast path that the dog walkers call Hat Corner, for reasons involving a gust and a man from Bristol in 1997. They are small and local and some of them will be gone in a generation. That is fine. That is what names do.

But I like to think that if somebody from the Survey came to my door with a ledger, and asked me what the bench was called, I would give them all of the names at once, and watch their face, and say: what do you want to know?

Trap Streets

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 09:00:00 GMT

For about twenty years, whenever I told somebody at a party that I made maps for a living, there was a reasonable chance they would lean in and ask whether it was true that we put fake streets on them to catch people copying.

I always said no. It is the answer I would have given either way, which I think they understood, and which is why they always looked so pleased.

The idea is real enough. A trap street is a feature that does not exist, a cul-de-sac, a little bend in a road, a pond, inserted into a map so that if it turns up on somebody else’s map you know where they got it from. Mapmakers have a long and not entirely noble history of copying each other, and a long and entirely understandable history of being annoyed about it. The best traps are tiny and plausible. Nobody will ever drive down them, because there is nowhere for them to go.1Dictionaries do the same thing with invented words, which lexicographers call mountweazels. I find it charming that the word for a fake entry is itself a fake entry’s name.

The most famous of them is a town.

The story goes like this, and I should say at the start that it is told in several versions, and I have no way of checking which is right, which seems appropriate.

In the 1930s, two men at a company called General Drafting were making a road map of New York State for Esso. Somewhere in the Catskills, at a junction of two dirt roads with nothing at it at all, they put a dot and a name: Agloe. The name was made out of their initials, scrambled. It was a trap. If Agloe ever showed up on a rival’s map, they would know.

A few years later it did. General Drafting went to the rival, ready for a fight, and the rival said, in effect: but Agloe is real. And it was. Somebody had built a general store at that junction, and, finding that the map said they were in Agloe, had called it the Agloe General Store. The county had a record of the place. The lie had come true because somebody believed it enough to stand in it.

I have thought about the shopkeeper a great deal. You look at a map, and it tells you that the empty crossroads where you have decided to sell petrol and bread and fishing tackle has a name, and the name is not one you’ve heard before, and you do not think this map is wrong. You think well, then. You paint the sign. There are worse ways to make a place. Most places, if you go back far enough, were made by somebody deciding that they were.

I said no at parties because, as far as I ever knew, the Survey did not do it. But I didn’t tell them the other thing, which is that every map is full of lies, and that a great deal of my working life was spent telling them carefully.

Take a road. On a 1:50,000 sheet, an ordinary two-lane road is perhaps seven metres wide. Drawn to scale, it would be about a seventh of a millimetre across, thinner than a hair, and you would never see it. So we drew it wider, a millimetre or so, wide enough to read at arm’s length in a moving car. A millimetre on that sheet is fifty metres on the ground. Which means that, on the map, every road in the country is fifty metres wide, and anything standing beside it, a house, a pub, a church, has to be pushed aside to make room.

The word for this is displacement, and I have done a great deal of it. In my first year, on a sheet covering part of mid-Wales, I spent most of a Thursday moving a chapel a third of a millimetre to the left so that the road beside it could be drawn at the proper thickness. On the ground, the chapel would have moved about seventeen metres, into a field. It is still, in my opinion, the most impressive thing I can say at dinner.2The chapel is still there, I’m told, in its proper position, and so far as I know the congregation never noticed it had been moved.

Then there is selection: what to leave out. Not every gate, not every shed, not every footpath that a farmer’s dog has worn through a hedge. And simplification: the coastline that, if you followed every wrinkle, would never end, smoothed to a line you can actually draw. And exaggeration, and classification, and all the other little words in the manual for the ways a map is not quite the ground.

There is a story by Borges, a single paragraph long, about an empire whose cartographers became so skilled that they made a map of the empire the same size as the empire, which coincided with it point for point. The next generations found it useless, and left it out in the desert to rot, and in his telling you can still find tattered bits of it, sheltering animals and beggars.

That is the map with no lies in it. It is the territory. Nobody can use it.

So I don’t think the right question is whether a map lies. It is whether it lies on your behalf. The road is drawn too wide so you can find it. The chapel is moved so you can see it. The thousand small, true things are left out so that the few you need are visible. A good map is a kind of courtesy: somebody has walked the ground before you and decided, on your behalf, what you could do without.

A trap street is the opposite. It is a lie told for the mapmaker, not for you. It’s the only kind of map lie I ever found genuinely irritating, and I think that is why Agloe delights me so much. It is the one trap that turned. Somebody built a shop on the lie, and sold bread in it, and the lie became the most honest thing on the sheet.

The store closed long ago, and Agloe faded off the maps again, and I am told there is nothing at that junction now but trees. I have never been. I’m not sure I want to. I would like it to stay where it is, which is half on the ground and half on the paper, a small dot that was wrong and then was right and then was wrong again, at the meeting of two roads that go nowhere in particular.

The Zero at Newlyn

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 09:00:00 GMT

When people ask why I moved to Newlyn, I tell them about the light, because that is the answer they are expecting, and because the light here is genuinely ridiculous: a flat, silvered, upturned-bowl light that once made a whole school of painters give up on London. It is a good answer. It is not quite the true one.

The true one is that there is a small hut at the end of the South Pier, and inside it, the height of everything begins.1The painters were the Newlyn School: Stanhope Forbes, Walter Langley and their friends, who came for the light in the 1880s and stayed for the fish. Their pictures are mostly of people mending nets and looking stoic about it. I am fond of them anyway.

Let me explain, though I know I am about to lose some of you. If you have ever looked at an Ordnance Survey map and seen a small number beside a dot on a hilltop, 248, say, you have been told how far that hill stands above something. The something is mean sea level. But the sea, as anybody who has stood on a beach for more than ten minutes will know, does not have a level. It has a mood. It goes up and down twice a day, more at the full moon, less at the quarters, higher when the wind leans on it and the pressure drops, lower in the long blue calm of a September high. If you want to measure from the sea you first have to decide what the sea is doing on average, and to do that you have to watch it for a long time.

So, between 1915 and 1921, somebody watched it. A tide gauge in the hut on the pier recorded the height of the water, hour after hour, for six years: through the war, through the influenza, through whatever was happening in the lives of the people reading it that we will never know about. At the end, the readings were averaged, and the average was declared to be nought. Ordnance Datum Newlyn. Every height on every map of mainland Britain is a distance above that number.2I have tried to imagine doing anything every hour for six years. The closest I have come is worrying.

I spent twenty-three years making maps, and I knew all of this the way you know your own postcode. It was a fact in the back of a manual. I had never once thought of it as a place until the autumn after I left the Survey, when I came down to look at a house I couldn’t afford, and walked out along the pier in the rain because there was nothing else to do while I waited for the estate agent, and found it.

It is not much to look at. A squat, whitewashed building the size of a garden shed with ambitions, sitting on the very end of the granite, with the trawlers nudging at their ropes beside it and the gulls conducting a long-running dispute on its roof. There is a small sign. There was nobody about. I stood in front of it for longer than I would like to admit, with water running off the end of my nose, feeling the way I imagine some people feel at the source of a river: a bit foolish, a bit moved, and very conscious that this was not the kind of thing you could explain to the estate agent.

From here, the height was carried inland. Surveyors with a level and a pair of staffs walked it up the country in short, careful steps, a few dozen metres at a time, reading the difference between one staff and the next and adding it up, all the way to Scotland. Wherever they paused they cut a mark into something solid, a church tower, a bridge, the corner of a bank, so that the next person would not have to start again from the pier. You will have walked past hundreds of them. A horizontal bar above a broad arrow, chiselled into the stone at about knee height. Each one says, very quietly: here, exactly here, is this far above the hut at Newlyn.

These are benchmarks. They are why this website is called what it is called, and they are, I think, the most modest monuments in Britain.

The part I didn’t know, until I lived here, is that the zero is no longer at sea level.

The gauge is still working; it has been working, with interruptions, for more than a century, and the record it keeps is one of the longest in the world. What it shows, if you plot it, is a line that wobbles a great deal from year to year and goes, very steadily, upwards. The sea at Newlyn is now something like twenty centimetres higher than the sea those observers averaged in 1921. The zero stayed where it was. The water moved.

So the number that every map of the country is built on is, strictly speaking, a photograph. It is the sea as it was in a particular six years, the years my grandmother was a girl, held still. The water lapping at the steps below the hut each morning is already a hand’s breadth above it, and climbing.3A hand’s breadth is my measure, not the Survey’s. I am retired. I am allowed.

I find I don’t mind this as much as I expected to. I spent my working life among people who were very serious about accuracy, and I am one of them, and I know what it means that the ground beneath our maps is a fixed decision about a moving thing. But that seems to me to be true of most of the zeroes we measure ourselves against. The weight we were at twenty-five. The town we grew up in. The version of a person we knew before they were ill. We pick a moment, we average it, we call it level, and we go on measuring from it long after the water has moved on.

I live at about thirty-one metres, give or take. I know this because there is a benchmark on the wall of the chapel at the top of my hill, and I have done the sums.

Most mornings I walk down to the harbour, which takes me from thirty-one metres to roughly four, and I go out along the pier as far as the hut. I don’t do anything there. I stand for a minute and look at the water, which is higher than it was, and at the hut, which is exactly where it was, and I think: this is where it starts. Everything else in the country is measured from here: every hill I ever drew, every mountain I will never climb, the chapel wall, the kitchen table, me.

It is a comfort, I find, to stand at the bottom of something. Then I walk back up the hill and put the kettle on, thirty-one metres above a sea that isn’t there any more.