Gone But Not Forgotten

I enjoy reading a map almost as much as a book – place names, proximities, landscapes, routes all fascinate me, and though the geographical features of seas, coastlines, mountains and vegetation remain constant (at least in my lifetime) the human imposed territorial boundaries and names change with history, politics and fashion, thus current atlases while usefully keeping things up to date, erase from the face of the earth nomenclature that intrigued me at school where my love of maps began - places such as Bechuanaland, Tanganyika, Rangoon, Ceylon, Siam, Yugoslavia, and nearer to home, counties like Westmorland, Rutland and Kirkcudbrightshire; in an attempt to roll back the years I rifled the charity book shop yesterday hoping to find an old 1960’s atlas but the furthest back I could get was one from about the 1980’s or 1990’s, undated but dateable from the inclusion in its snapshot of England, the short lived county of Cleveland.