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The survey view requires a working and instrumental knowledge of a path network set within a region. There is a joke about an Englishman in Ireland asking for directions to a specific location. An Irishman tells him that: ‘If I were you I would not be starting from here’. The joke is meant to be made at the expense of the Irish. The last laugh lies with the Irishman, though. For his reply shows that he possesses a comprehensive understanding of his landscape, which is not predicated on a single viewpoint and one linear journey, with one defined beginning and one endpoint. The conditional future and the conditional past in his answer display a wealth of other possibilities coming from an insider’s knowledge of the landscape.

Names people bestow on places can lend them a symbolic significance, lacking in places that are unnamed (Hough 1990). The naming and distinguishing of a territory brings life to the land and adds meaning and resonance to human experience. A named landscape can behave as a large-scale mnemonic of shared history and tradition (Lynch 1960). Gaston Bachelard coined the term topoanalysis. By which he meant the psychological study of sites where intimate chapters of our lives have occurred (Bachelard 1969). Amongst aboriginal peoples, place-names act as mnemonics for past human actions (Basso 1996 & Weiner 1991). The prefix topo- can be joined with the noun mnemonic to make the neologism - topo-mnemonic.