500words

Versailles… well that’s an easy subject… because everyone knows about the Palace of Versailles right?   It’s the one that was the principle residence of Louis XIV; the one where Marie Antoinette allegedly said ‘let them eat cake’ when she was told that the peasants of France had no bread in the 17 th or 18 th century; the one where the Treaty of Versailles was signed - the most important of the peace treaties which ended the First World War; the one which has the stunning Hall of Mirrors, paying tribute to the political, economic and artistic success of France during the reign of Loui XIV.   You may even know about the then most expensive wedding reception ever, held for Vanisha Mittal and Amit Bhatia and their families in 2004, costing a mere USD60million.   You may know, but its less likely, that the Treaty of Paris was signed there, ending the American Revolution in 1783 – why was it signed there you may wonder?   Well this article won’t tell you. But poor V...

    You probably know that the Gardens of Versailles are famous for their water features including lakes, ponds, reflections and 50 wonderful fountain displays.   Some restoration work has been carried out, often at curved pipe sections, and some small sections have been replaced since the 1600’s, but incredibly most of the original hydraulics remain intact and the majority of the original network of waterworks is still in place.    Once the landscape was levelled the search for water began.   This quest inspired the greatest leap forward in hydraulic technology and engineering since Roman times. Where would the water come from and how could it be pumped around the gardens?   What sized pipes and how much pressure would be required to produce a 10ft fountain on a site lacking a water supply?   At one time there were more than 2000 fountains in the Gardens of Versailles and a 46km network of underground pipes supplied the ponds with running w...

  Versailles     Royal Hunting Lodge to Extraordinary Visitor Attraction   In the Carte de L’Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Chartres, a document pre-dating 1038, one of the signatories was Hugo de Versailles, the seigneur of Versailles.   During this period the village centred on a small castle and church.   This was destroyed by plague and the 100 years war (1332-1453).    In 1575 Albert De Gondi, a member of Henri II’s court purchased the title, he became captain of the first company of gentlemen of the King's household and   invited King Louis XIII on several hunting trips in the forests of Versailles.   Much taken with the location Louis decided to build a hunting lodge there. Philbert Le Roi, royal engineer and architect, was employed in 1631 to create a chateau to replace the hunting lodge.   This small chateau of three wings around an open court remained as the core of the Sun King’s great palace of Versailles.  ...

I had been thinking about maps for some weeks - indeed it transpired to be one week too many. I had though been asking myself the basic question, of what exactly does a map do? Maps help you to not get lost. I can remember being lost on many occasions, sometimes without a map. Which didn’t help matters. But I also remember being really lost , even when I had one. Being lost can be a lot of fun, even quite exciting. But it can also cause quarrelling when on trips abroad, particularly if your travelling companion is irritable, or suffering from ennui. Having a map is one thing but being able to read one is quite another. They can be rather confusing. Many years ago, aged 15, I managed to navigate my duke of Edinburgh expedition group, through the driving icy rain, down the slopes of Slieve Donard, thanks to my excellent orienteering skills, a plastic compass and guessing that a triangle was the symbol for a prominent, memorable rock. I was duly praised that evening by our troop leader. I...

A map is defined as ‘a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads etc’.  It is also noted that this may be a symbolic representation highlighting the relationships between elements in space, either perceived or actual.    The word came from medieval Latin Mappa mundi, which used the words cloth and world.  This was shortened to ‘map’ representing a two-dimensional view.  At the time maps were first developed its very likely that the map makes believed the world to be flat, ie two-dimensional.   Today we look at flat maps, however we look at them – on paper or on screen. A cadastral map is a comprehensive land recording of real estate boundaries and used for legal purposes to denote ownership and responsibility for that land.   The map is an illustration of a cadastre which also contains a record of interests, rights, and responsibilities of the owner. An early cadastre depicted details on a ...

Frederick Law Olmsted and John Snow Geographic Mapping for Public Health   In the 19 th century it was believed that diseases were transmitted by bad odours in the air, known as ‘miasma,’ a theory which dominated medical and political stances and responses. In 1854, a major cholera outbreak reached Soho in London, following previous outbreaks in 1832 and 1849. At this time in Soho, sanitation was poor, there were no sewage systems in place and there was a high population density. John Snow, who was admitted as a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1850, began mapping the deaths from cholera and discovered that they were mainly those whose primary water source was the Broad Street water pump. His research was significant enough to persuade local authorities to disable the pump and is credited as contributing to significantly to containing the disease within the area. This new way of thinking, intertwining geographic mapping and public health, was furthered by Fre...

If I asked you what country had the longest coastline you might be able to tell me pretty quickly that the answer is Canada. And even if you didn’t know off the top of your head, after a bit of a look at a map you would probably be able to see that the answer is Canada, in part due to its massive size, but also because it has a huge number of islands. But you would find it infinitely harder to tell me exactly how long that coastline is, and that brings us to the coastline paradox. At the most basic level the coastline paradox says that the length of coastlines is not fixed and depends on the scale you measure it at. Or to put it another way, the closer you look, the longer it gets. We know that the length of coastlines has baffled cartographers for centuries, but the concept of the coastline paradox was first brought to light quite recently. In 1951 Lewis Fry Richardson, a mathematician and pacifist, decided to try and figure out if the length of the border between two countries h...

  I believed modern maps to be highly accurate, what with satellites and everything, and surely cartographers are precise and meticulous people, but in reality our maps are full of deliberate mistakes, distortions, jokes, errors, lies, vandalism and flights of fancy. Firstly, maps are fundamentally doomed to be wrong because there is no single perspective from which to view the Earth - our social and political biases just keep on shining through.   Sixteenth century Europeans were happiest with a world view that inflated their countries to centre position at the top of the world, while the 1623 Chinese-Globe, made for the Emperor, exaggerated the size of China and positioned it in the middle of the world surrounded by small, off-shore islands.   These days climate scientists are looking closely at Arctic maps but when Geradus Mercator tried to map the Arctic he basically made it up.   The Septentrionalium Terrarium (published 1606) includes magnet stones, giant w...

  Mapping Ireland Today we think of maps as information, giving directions to get us from one place to another, much like a sat-nav, but over the centuries since Ptolomey’s first map of Ireland in 140AD most maps had to do with conquest and subsequent ownership. Although Ptolomy’s map is interesting in it’s antiquity it is not informative in terms of modern Ireland.  Of the many maps of Ireland made over the centuries and there are two which stand out as important.   The William Petty maps for Oliver Cromwell, starting in 1652, and the ordnance survey mapping of Ireland, undertaken between 1829 and 1842. The Irish Confederate wars of 1641, which started in Ulster as an uprising by Catholic landowners resisting increased taxation, spread to the rest of the country with the aim of ridding Ireland of English rule.   2,000 Protestants were massacred and many thousands forced to flee.   In 1649 Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland to eliminate opposition to Engl...