Scares are the marks of life; they help us identify where we are. They resemble the roads travelled, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally too. Think about the human body for a second. Every single person with get a scar that marks a certain time in their life; they end of their life a person will have countless scares all over their body, sometimes they will have scares that develop on another scare, each symbolising a memory. It is the same for the earth, all the seasons it goes through and the experiences it has leave scares. I thought of this concept after discussing mapping in our workshop. Maps are a structure that allows to isolate and identify places. I began to develop this concept that each place, like every person, has a history; history can only exist with experience and experience will always leave a mark or scar, whether the marks are physical or not depends on what the experience is. For example, World War two left devastating physical and not physical scares both on the people involved and the place of battle. On one hand, we are still able to visit some of the trenches that were made, which represent the physical scars left on the earth by this particular experience. On the other hand, this war left a mental scar that is pasted by from generation to generation through plays and films that reflect its brutality.

Below is part of a map of Lincoln City. Each road on this map is a scar that resembles this era of Lincoln. The road structure may change in the future, but there will be physical reminders the structure it has right now for a long time after it changes. For some people these roads have a mental and emotional meaning. And like the scars on a human body, sometimes roads follow a pattern other times there just random lines, but they always mean something.

I began to think if naming a place would affect people’s reaction to that place. For example, if I road were to be called ‘Happy road’ would it change people’s mood if they knew they were walking down ‘Happy road’? This then raised the question, can some words affect people’s state of mind when said in a particular place? Or does an individual have to have some sort of attachment to a place in order to be affected?