Merry Christmas from Wesmandy, Nadolig Llawen o Tircambry, Joyeux Noël de Cernou!

It’s nearly the end of the year, so I thought it was time that I posted an update on Wesmandy.

My intention - late in 2015 - was to develop Wesmandy chronologically : map the whole country (not in too much detail) as it was in the year 1400, and then update it century-by-century while writing the history at the same time, until I got to the modern era. Since medieval towns are small and simple, and villages are even simpler, I naïvely imagined that I could have the 1400 “baseline” completed by about June …

It’s now December and I am nowhere near completing the whole of Wesmandy 1400. I have roughly mapped rivers, main roads and administrative boundaries throughout the country, and put nodes for cities, towns and villages, but have only done more detailed work in my three eastern shires of Cilveyland, Eskland and Southclist : about 20% of the total land area. There are various reasons for this, including wildly underestimating the effort needed, changing my mind about exactly what I’m mapping, getting diverted by other things (e.g. Porthbrenin), which I’ve done historically from 1400 to 1900) and simply not having as much time on OGF as I would like.

If I keep going like this, it will be years before Wesmandy joins the rest of you in the 21st century (am I the only person who didn’t map a single motorway in 2016? :) ). I enjoy “mapping medieval”, but it is frustrating to not to have Wesmandy in the modern world, so I’m thinking of changing tactics and doing my historical mapping area-by-area rather than keep the whole country in step. The national history will get written as I take the first area forward through time, so, with luck, Wesmandy will have a 21st-century presence sometime in 2017.

Water, water, everywhere!

The thing which has distracted me from mapping towns and villages recently has been waterways. Initially, I mapped the major rivers of Wesmandy, and I have been adding streams/brooks as I map villages and towns (because every settlement needs a water supply). I thought I was doing quite well when I got to this point:

… but then I looked at some extracts of Britain from OSM, such as my home county of Devon (to the same scale):

and I realized just how many small waterways there really should be! In the areas of Britain that I looked at, there are between 1.2 and 1.3+ km of waterway for each sq.km of land area. Other places I looked at in northern Europe had less, but I’m guessing that’s because all the streams haven’t been mapped.

So, for the past few weeks, my main activity has been adding streams : I started in Cilveyland (which is pretty well done) and am working south:

If and when I start somewhere new one day, I’m going to do it properly : topography, then waterways, then other natural features/landuse … and then add “the human effect”.