One of the interesting properties of maps is that people tend to believe them, and treat them as inherently factual documents. Sometimes they are. But many of the world’s interesting maps show places that are totally imaginary. They can include places that will never exist outside someone’s imagination, or places that might, some day, be created.

As an aside, there is a huge body of literature addressing the issue of the inherent credibility of maps, much of which makes the point that map readers need to learn to interpret maps critically, to bring to the reading of a map the same level of skepticism we might bring to reading a piece of journalism or the text of a government publication. But that’s a topic for another day. Let’s think instead about maps that are meant to represent places of the imagination.

When I taught cartography to college undergrads, I would start the discussion on the first day of classes by showing 20 or so maps, of wildly different styles and forms. The purpose of the discussion was just to get us all thinking about the wide variety of maps that were legitimate topics for inclusion in the course over the semester, and to help us all break out of an automatic association of the word “map” with the idea of a road map, either on paper or screen.

Like all classroom exercises, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Some years, those 20 maps would trigger some thoughtful and creative discussions. But one year, it failed dismally. None of the maps seemed interesting to anyone; nothing I tried could get a discussion going, until I displayed this map.

One student, who had said nothing all class, blurted out “I like that map!” Another volunteered, later in the discussion, that it was a “whimsical” and distinctly feminine map.

Those were interesting observations, and led to a good classroom conversation about maps that exist at multiple scales (note the three separate maps, all at very different scales, within the single image) about whether maps can be gendered, whether there really is such a thing as a masculine or feminine map. But the real reason I displayed the map was to make a point about mapping imaginary places. Many of the features in this map do not exist on the ground, but come from a work of fiction, so they exist only in the imagination of the author and her readers. Fans of murder mysteries might recognize the location (paying particular attention the big inset in the lower right corner) as the setting for the Ruth Galloway mysteries by Elly Griffiths.

Some the map shows real places, some shows places that exist only in Griffith’s fiction. Norfolk is real, King’s Lynn is real, the North Sea is real. But Ruth’s house, Cathbad’s caravan, and the henge circle are pure fiction.

The Ruth Galloway mysteries seemed to call out for a map. North American readers, like me, need to know where all the places mentioned in the books are. More important, however, is the way that Griffith’s writing turns the landscape into a character. In a lot of fiction, perhaps in most, the landscape is just a setting, a background on which the characters live out their lives. Griffith’s work is different. In her books, the land actually moves the plot forward; to use a dreadful buzzword, the land has “agency.” In the one book, The Crossing Places, the land actually resolves the essential conflict in the plot. (Forgive me, please, for not saying more; it’s a great story and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.)