‘ve found myself drawn to a particular challenge: properly mapping the Rhondda Valleys in South Wales. It’s a task that’s proving both fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, but one that’s teaching me invaluable lessons about the complexities of local geography.

My approach has been quite straightforward - I’ve chosen to focus primarily on Ystrad, the area I know most intimately. This isn’t just because it’s familiar territory, but because understanding one place thoroughly seems like the best foundation for expanding outwards. Every quirk I discover, every mapping technique I develop, and every local peculiarity I uncover in Ystrad becomes a tool I can apply to neighbouring areas.

One of the most surprising aspects of this mapping project has been discovering just how much the “official” maps get wrong. I’ve taken to photographing street name signs and house numbers wherever I go - a habit that’s revealed some genuinely baffling discrepancies between reality and what appears on both Ordnance Survey maps and Google Maps.

The most striking example I’ve encountered is Bryn Terrace in Ystrad. This is a very real street, with real houses, real residents, and real post delivered daily. Yet somehow, it’s completely absent from both OS and Google mapping data. Walking down it, photographing the street sign, and checking my GPS coordinates left me questioning whether I was experiencing some sort of cartographic twilight zone. How does an entire street simply not exist in the digital world when it’s so clearly part of the physical one?

The house numbering systems throughout the Rhondda have provided another source of bewilderment. What might seem like straightforward sequential numbering often reveals itself to be anything but. Streets that appear to follow odd/even patterns suddenly throw in a completely out-of-sequence number, or entire ranges seem to have been skipped altogether.

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