As a hiking enthusiast and archive researcher, I have often wondered how I could bring the two practices together. How could I use one to enrich the experience of the other?
Archives and maps aren’t that different after all. They are both systems to organise and represent physical and information spaces. As my colleague Andrew Janes (Head of Archival Practice and Data Curation) has written in his article Making maps of records: what cartography can teach us about archival description, maps can help us to understand the nature of archive catalogues.
Both maps and catalogue records are tools for orientation and sense-making that involve abstraction, selection and privileging. They are not direct reproduction of information, but 'a particular way of looking at things' that is interdisciplinary, collaborative and not static. Mapmaking and recordkeeping serve both as 'inventories supporting intellectual control of space' and as ‘finding aids’ supporting the understanding of access to and navigation within an unfamiliar space.
I have already stepped out of the metaphor once and used an itinerary created by historian Corinne Fowler to reveal records at The National Archives. With colleagues from the Collections Expertise and Engagement department I embarked on a symbolic walk in the archive to find records documenting the history of colonialism in the English countryside, plotting a journey from Charborough to Barbados and Perth (Australia).
This time I want to do something different.
Spaces becoming places
In his seminal book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), Yi-Fu Tuan (1930–2022), the founder of humanistic geography, argues that geography is not just about maps – it's about how people feel, remember, imagine, and dwell in the world. Through lived experience, memory, and human perception, he explains, we transform spaces into places. We make them familiar and recognisable, we bond with them.
Archives, and in particular state archives, like unknown spaces, can sometimes be impenetrable and off-putting. With records hiding in boxes, accessible only through limited catalogue descriptions, navigating them can be difficult. If we don’t have a path, a direction, or a specific question in mind, it is difficult to explore them and generate serendipitous encounters.
Retrieving an archival box from the stores
Walking is a way to familiarise with space, to make it 'place'. Stumbling upon villages, memorials, natural features and people that speak to our consciousness, we accumulate experience, we connect. So, what if I used walking to help me search the catalogue, and the records I find as aids to transform the space I have walked through into a 'place' I can connect to? What if I used walking as a practice to make an apparently impenetrable archive more familiar?
There are many research projects (e.g. Developing Healthy Archives, led by Prof. Kate Dossett at University of Leeds) and activities looking at how we can access and make archives more familiar, welcoming. This suggests an increasing interest for alternative, less standardised, ways to engage with archival collections.
So, while climbing up and down the South Coastal Path in North Devon last October, caught as all walkers are in reveries that have the unpredictable sweeping force of gusts of wind, I had a very simple intuition: why not becoming an archive rambler? What if I used the trace on the map to guide me through The National Archives’ records to reveal the hidden stories of the places I was going through? What would I discover? What would come out of it? Why not try?
Unfolded Ordnance Survey map of North Devon with my walking route added.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. After all, this is what research is: a meandering through ideas. Sometimes the outcome is a book, an article, a piece of software or an artwork, sometimes a methodology.
So, while I was walking in North Devon, from Hartland to Westward Ho!, stopping in Clovelly for the night, I took a few notes and photos, and decided to look them up on Discovery once back. What would the records reveal?
A memorial at Hartland Point
Just after I began my journey at Hartland Point, walking along the cliff, I stumbled upon a small memorial stone. I stopped to read the plaque and discovered it was dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in the tragedy of the Glenart Castle.
Image 1 of 2
My view of Hartland Point.
Giorgia Tolfo
Image 2 of 2
The Glenart Castle memorial.
Giorgia Tolfo
The HMHS Glenart Castle, as I discovered later, was a steamship used as a British hospital ship during the First World War ('HMHS' stands for 'His Majesty's Hospital Ship'). According to records held at The National Archives, it was torpedoed twice, the first time on 1 March 1917 outside Portsmouth. The damage was contained and after fixing it, the ship could resume navigating between continental Europe and the UK.
In regard to the accident about 11.45 p.m. 1st instant to the Hospital Ship "Glenart Castle" bound from Havre to Southampton with wounded, believed to have been struck by mine or torpedo, we have no doubt that reports have been sent to the Admiralty by the Naval Authorities at Portsmouth, into which port we are glad that the ship should have been capable of being towed, ...
We feel sure that the Admiralty will fully appreciate the excellent discipline and courage which were shown with the result that by 12.50 a.m. 2nd instant or shortly thereafter, all the wounded, 525 cases including 300 stretcher cases, all the Medical Staff 68 persons and practically the whole of the crew of 115 persons were safely transferred from the steamer, without loss of life or injury, to the ship's boats and to the trawlers
Report of the damage suffered by The HMHS Glenart Castle outside Portsmouth and the investigation into its cause. Catalogue reference: ADM 137/3253
Documentation of the damages to the Glenart Castle on 1 March 1917. Catalogue reference: ADM 137/3253
The second accident happened at 4:00 am on the night of 26 January 1918 off Lundy. This time, however, the ship sank within five minutes.
As historian and collections expert Jessamy Carlson recounts in detail in her blog post 100 years since the sinking of the Glenart Castle, on that night, '144 souls perished with the ship. All eight of the nurses on board (of which The National Archives holds the service records) went down with the ship.'
The sinking represents one of the worst losses of nursing staff at war, but also a very controversial incident, as the ship was fully illuminated, as required by hospital ships, when sunk.
Details of the second accident that damaged HMHS Glenart Castle. Catalogue reference: ADM 137/3424
The wreck lies 20 miles from the point where the memorial stone was laid. I looked in the distance, but it was grey and foggy, so I went to the Vision of Britain website and tried to picture the area with the help of a British War Office map.
Screenshot showing Lundy island on British War Office map GSGS 4369, Sheet 7. SW England.
Great Britain Historical GIS/University of Portsmouth, scanned by John Westwood
Looking at it, I could point to Lundy and Hartland Point as well as myself standing on the cliff looking in the distance. I thought about the 144 people who lost their lives, about those who were on the lookout and heard the explosion, and those who were sleeping. Did they realise what was happening? How old where they, where did they come from, where were their families and beloved? If I dug more in the archive, I could find more information, but I decided to leave it there. I raised my eyes from the screen and spent a minute in silence. Then I returned to my trace.
Views of Clovelly
After 15 miles, windswept and damp, I arrived at Clovelly.
Clovelly is a small fishing village perched on a 400-foot cliff overlooking the sea. It was owned by the Queen of England and has been privately held since Elizabethan times. With no access to cars, walking into it feels like stepping into a different time. The same time that envelops the images in the Dixon Scott Photography Collection.
John Dixon-Scott was a photographer who set to record landscapes and ways of life he felt were disappearing. He travelled around Britain taking pictures of buildings, rural scenes and people, building up a collection of over 14,000 photographs. Among these, I could find several documenting Clovelly.
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- From our collection
- INF 9/800
- Title
- John Dixon-Scott's photographs of Clovelly
- Date
- 1926–1942
John Dixon-Scott photograph of Clovelly high street (probably 1930s, catalogue reference: INF 9/800/7) alongside a photograph taken by the author in July 2025.
What I found most remarkable, looking at John Dixon-Scott’s photograph, was discovering that I stayed at the New Inn, and took a picture of the same high street from its entrance looking down towards the harbour. Could I tell the difference between our photographs? For a moment I felt like the photographer back in the 1930s, shooting the image to preserve the view of the village for posterity. Did John Dixon-Scott think Clovelly would also disappear or change like much of the rural landscape of the country?
Downloading the images from the catalogue and comparing them to my recent memory and photographs of Clovelly, I thought about all the emotions a collection of old photographs can contain. Not just those represented on the surface, but those that arise from encountering them and recognising places we’ve been to and realising not much has changed (at least on the surface).
John Dixon-Scott photograph of Clovelly harbour (probably 1930s, catalogue reference: INF 9/800/10) alongside a photograph taken by the author in July 2025.
Join me from Westward Ho! to Bideford
I hope you’ll join me for the second part of my walk as I continue to Westward Ho! and Bideford, and explore some 125-year-old photographs and a Cold War operation to help liberate a (hypothetical) UK that had been conquered by the Soviet Union.
