The folded map used by the Larchmere delivery office shows sheds, gates, a drinking trough and a particularly large ash tree. It shows almost no roads. At first glance, this seems a serious omission. In practice, the people carrying it already knew how to travel between the villages. Their difficulties began with the last few yards.
Clerk Peter Rell drew the map for substitute drivers. He marked entrances that could be mistaken for neighbouring yards, places where a loaded vehicle could turn and the gate that remained chained even when the house beyond it was expecting a delivery. A conventional road map could bring a driver close without answering any of these questions.
The scale changes according to the problem. A short approach to a farm occupies as much paper as the stretch between two settlements. This allowed Rell to distinguish a front door from the entrance at which sacks were accepted. Distance had given way to the amount of explanation a particular arrival required.
Corrections accumulated in the margins. When the ash tree was removed, the note did not simply cross it out. It identified the pale stump and the new fence beyond it, giving a driver a way to recognise that the remembered landmark had changed. The purpose was successful delivery, rather than a perfectly tidy picture.
The map belongs to a kind of local knowledge that formal surveys can leave aside. It records how an address was encountered by somebody carrying something heavy, keeping an appointment and hoping not to reverse unnecessarily. Its roads were absent because they were the least uncertain part of the journey.