Reading cultural features and interpreting maps

Cultural features (settlements, buildings, roads, railways) are shown by conventional signs, symbols and colours.

Settlements:

• Rural settlement types: compact, scattered, linear (strung along a river valley, road, embankment or coast) and circular.
• Urban centres: cross-road town, nodal point (roads radiate in all directions), market centre, hill station, coastal resort, port, manufacturing centre with satellite towns, capital town and religious centre. A cross-road town spreads in a fan along the roads, with the crossing and main market at its heart.
• What decides a site: water, food supply, relief, occupation and defence. Density of settlement follows food supply. Compare the settlement map with the contour and drainage maps to see why.

Transport and communication depend on relief, population, size and resource development of the area.

Interpreting a sheet. First find the north line and the scale, and know the legend. Then study it under these heads:

• Marginal information: sheet number, location, grid references, extent in degrees and minutes, scale, districts covered.
• Relief and drainage: hills, plateaus, plains, mountains, slopes; rivers, valleys and drainage patterns (dendritic, radial, ring, trellis, internal).
• Land use: forests (reserved, protected and so on), farmland, orchards, wasteland, industry, and services such as schools and hospitals.
• Transport and communication: highways, district roads, cart tracks, footpaths, railways, waterways, post offices.
• Settlements and occupation: farming in rural areas, lumbering and simple farming in forest and hill regions, fishing on coasts, services and business in towns.

Procedure: locate the area from the sheet's index number; note the scale and contour interval; trace landforms, drainage, land use, and settlement and transport on separate sheets; describe each pattern; then superimpose pairs to find relationships, for example contours over land use shows how slope affects what the land is used for. Compare with aerial photographs and satellite images of the same area to update the map.

Example (new): laying the roads tracing over the contour tracing shows a highway winding along a valley floor instead of crossing the ridge: the road follows the easiest gradient.