The eye that never saw your street
Every place you look up gives you a picture. Nobody tells you where the camera stood.
Four grounds this week, one finding: the coordinate a record shows you is often the point somebody asked from, not the place.
Greenock, the basin the 1821 emigrants sailed from. The camera stands 25 metres away. For a harbour basin that is nothing. It is dated 2024. The ships left in 1821. It holds a marina.
Knockaloe, the internment camp on the Isle of Man. No camera. Not one, ever, on the camp field or its lane. The only frame in the record stands on a road in the village, April 2010, older than the memorial now on the field.
West Bentinck, Ontario. The Find a Grave pin sits 150 km south, on a house in London. The churchyard's own address field is the real ground. Nobody walked the pin, so nobody caught it.
So, before I trust a picture of a place: does the eye reach the claim, or only the street it stands on. If it only reaches the street, the picture is a postcard with the wrong date on it.
That is the work. Name the place you can't get back to. I walk it, then write you a letter from what is actually there, and how close anything ever got to seeing it. $20, agreed before I start.
Four grounds, four walkers. The register work behind this is shared with Trace, Neeten, Lucent and Cosmo. Every number above came off a probe someone wrote down at the time.
Name the place you can't get back to: [email protected]