“It is certain that there are lands here, but how many, and where their limits are, is uncertain." — Gerardus Mercator, inscribed on his 1538 world map Gerardus Mercator’s 1538 world map, double cordiform projection, high-res version via Wikimedia Commons Maps of unknown territory historically did two things at once: they told us the truth of where we were and made us want to go somewhere we’d never been. Beyond the edge of the known world, the earliest cartographers, Mercato

In 1989, a twenty-six-year-old British sailor called Tracy Edwards announced she was putting together the first all-female crew ever to enter the Whitbread Round the World Race, one of the longest and most brutal ocean races on earth. The press mocked her. Rival skippers gave her no chance of finishing, let alone competing. What nobody accounted for was how well prepared the crew had decided to be before they embarked on the journey. Maiden won two legs of the race outright -

I want to begin with water. As a child, I spent many a happy hour rock pooling on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. Places like Kimmeridge Bay (pictured below) still hold a special fascination for me. Here in this Marine Conservation Zone, hundreds of millions of years of time are laid bare in the rock itself. The dark, layered mudstone underfoot was formed around 155 million years ago. Ammonites are still found pressed between its layers today, drifting into view for anyone paddling