The Wansdyke & District Forums

A confession of a harmless obsession, in case any of you share it. I hunt benchmarks. The little broadarrow cut into church plinths, bridge parapets and milestones, where the old Ordnance Survey levellers recorded a height. There are thousands across the country, most now superseded by GPS and quietly forgotten. I have found forty-odd in this district. There is a database online where you can log them with a photo and confirm they still exist, which matters, because every year a few vanish under render or road-widening. A small act of remembering. I cannot be the only one.

The database is here, for any fellow obsessives: https://www.bench-marks.org.uk/

Not the only one. I have logged a few. There is a flush bracket on the chapel gable that nobody ever notices. Quiet work. I like that nobody else wants it.

Eric, that is exactly it. The pleasure is partly that no one else is looking. A benchmark is a promise the old surveyors made to the future: this point is fixed, you can measure from here. Most of the marks outlast the certainty they were measuring. I find that oddly comforting.