Some walks can be done by giving in totally to wherever whim takes you (as in Debord’s derive), some require a map to help you find a way and some you retrace steps from memory or from what someone has told you of their memory.
When I was a child and giving directions to my house, I would explain that it was near to the big patch of trees that looked like giant broccoli.
In trying to capture the spirit of a place, I am also interested in recording the path of my journey. Predominantly, I use poetry and photographs to do this. However, I have started experimenting with what Greg Humphries calls a story map (Humphries, G. & Vayne, J. 2018 pg68). Story maps, unlike plan maps, use landmarks or points of specific, personal interest, to explain a route. Story maps rely upon the things that we, as humans, observe along the way; the things that are most imprinted on our minds about a place or the traces that we have left behind. They can of course be verbal, but they can also be visual. Tim Ingold refers to a similar idea but calls them sketch maps (Ingold, T. 2016 pg87). Sketch maps are made by storytellers and consist of gestures or traces made in the sand, snow, mud or with a simple tool on an available surface. These sort of maps do not provide all of the additional information you can find in an OS map, but simply the information needed to retrace the steps of a walk.
