Map of the Month: Apr 09 - Unfinishtstan Wall Map

This unusual item gives a whole new meaning to wall maps. It turned into a nice conversation piece recently when my wife and I had a staff reunion party for a whole load of people who used to work at John Bartholomew & Son Ltd. in Edinburgh, a precursor of the present-day Collins Geo. Those who got as far as the kitchen were intrigued to see this cartographic offering, about eight feet wide and well above head height. Some said afterwards that they hadn’t noticed it, but that might have been because they had drunk a lot of the wine they had brought, or else were too busy rabbiting on to the other 55 staffers who turned up. (They were not all in the kitchen at the same time, I hasten to add). Or possibly they were just being polite.


Click on the above image to view an enlarged map

Some months before that, I had found my oldest son Alistair (25) up a ladder with a felt-tip marker and a ‘man at work’ look. With no training in cartography but a lifetime’s immersion in family irony, he was rapidly coming up with more and more place names to put the finishing touches to his new map of Unfinishtstan and its neighbouring countries. A chip off the old bloke, I thought, but then I wouldn’t have thought of doing this. I was only able to come up with one idea for a place name, and that wasn’t particularly witty - so I left it to the master. It is all his own work. All the colours are original, inspiring the shapes of the countries and the sea.

The kitchen, I have to say, had remained undecorated for nearly a year - and I’m not sure I want to paper it again now anyway. You may say this is lazy and inefficient. But geodata workers are busy people! If I’d wallpapered it when it was needed, the world of cartography would surely have been the poorer, you are certain to agree.

Pountfoster City is explained by the fact that my wife Alice’s surname is Foster.

City of Pinxit is a reference to a large graffito painted on the wall to the right (off the picture) saying R POUNTAIN PINXIT 6 9 1996, which I put there to show people that I was forced to do Latin at school and therefore knew that old artists used to put pinxit to mean ‘He painted (it)’.

The boundaries of the Republic of Polyphilla are pre-defined by one of my slightly less than artistic attempts at being a plasterer. The Plastern Sea sounds as if it’s from ancient literature: Alistair had been studying the old horror poem Beowulf recently.

I particularly like the contrary-to-common-sense locations of the East and West Stonewall Islands. The chap knows perfectly well that east is east and west is west, it is just typical perversity to see if you’re paying attention.

Graysland is because we live in Upper Gray Street, though we do also have Paul Simon’s CD of almost the same name. No connection whatever with Elvis.

Stonecrack River gives rise to some worry. Why do all its tributaries point upstream? Or are they distributaries, all taking their leave and dying out one by one in this obviously very arid landscape? We must ask these things. But then, has anyone pondered why tributaries in real life always point downstream, as if the main river had somehow dragged them along?

I feel some time I should make a change to the Badley-Smooved Mountains. Clearly he should have spelt it Baddeley. We can treat this as the correction copy - though editing it could be almost as bad as punching copper plates flat from the back and then re-engraving the name. That was the procedure once for editing Barts’ Half-Inch maps, before they invented high-tech things like doing it on glass and later scratching the old name off. But then his spelling at the bottom right also needed correction - he had written A Pountain Scribbelzit by analogy with Pinxit, but did not realise that Pinxit is the past tense! I ask you. The man might have dabbled in Anglo-Saxon, but clearly knows very little Latin. So it had to be corrected. To Scribbeldit.

The other place names include Victorian Wastes [the house was built in 1865, so you could be peering at bits of 19th century wallpaper]; Kitchenville; Nowhereton; Edinburghopolis; the small enclave of Wallstainia, who one hopes maintains good relations with Unfinishtstan and Graysland; Decoratorburg; Whitecrop [a bump on the Polyfilla]; Isolatia; Undercoat Bay; Outcrop Isles [another bump here]; the Harpacoll Ocean; and Barts Island. Maybe the name density could do with some enhancement…. any more ideas before it finally disappears under the wallpaper, probably to be uncovered by the next owner of this house?

Text by Roger Pountain - Senior Information Analyst
Cartography by Alistair Pountain.

Now referred to on The Map Room and Map of the Week blogs