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Derwin Gowan
Telegraph-Journal

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ST. ANDREWS - Little issues count, Sue Clifford says.

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Derwin Gowan/Telegraph-Journal

Sue Clifford, centre, director of the British-based group Common Ground, with an example of a parish map to highlight what makes a community unique. With her are Maureen McIlwain, left, marketing director of Kingsbrae Garden, and Jude Valentine with the Tides Institute. Common Ground says such maps ‘can help bring people together to chart the things they value locally.’

She's the director of the British-based group Common Ground and spoke at a workshop in St. Andrews on developing parish maps.

Clifford started the parish maps program to develop local maps highlighting what makes a community unique.

The maps can draw attention to events in history, local industries, flora and fauna, churches and religion, myth and folklore.

"Making a parish map can help people to come together to chart the things that they value locally, to make their voice heard amongst professionals and developers," the Common Ground website says. Such a map can also "inform and assert (local people's) need for nature and culture on their own terms, and to begin to take action and some control in shaping the future of their place."

One map that Clifford included in her audio-visual display drew attention to a story about a dragon in a certain English town that died from eating too much cake.

Another from a lead-mining area recalls the Middle Ages when people could get their hand chopped off for digging without permission.

People can make a community project of a parish map, asking folks to contribute their knowledge and ideas.

"We're a tiny organization," Clifford said of Common Ground, which she started with two other people.

"We began in the mid-'80s, really because we thought nobody was championing sufficiently people's contact with their everyday surroundings.

"It was talking and talking and talking, and three of us decided we had to do something," she said.

Clifford, who was a university professor, has worked for Common Ground full time since 1990, writing books and pamphlets, talking to journalists and delivering presentations such as the one Tuesday in St. Andrews.

Among many other causes, Common Ground champions community orchards, a response to the loss of 95 per cent of the orchards in Kent, England's traditional apple district. England now imports apples, she said.

People "realized that it's about time that children realized where apples and apple juice comes from," she said. A community might save an old orchard for a park, or create a new orchard.

Clifford found things in her few days here that local people probably miss and might be good candidates for a parish map.

"Well, interesting, so fascinating. There is so much that is familiar and yet so different."

She stopped long enough to photograph the Anglican Church in St. Andrews. At first glance it looks much like a church one would see in England, except that it is built of wood, not stone, reflecting Charlotte County's lumbering heritage.

The Common Ground website says a parish map offers visitors "a new way of looking at a place, and shows a glimpse of the vibrant life behind the obvious."

Common Ground does not take on big political issues such as the controversy in this border region over liquefied natural gas tankers in Passamaquoddy Bay.

"Speaking personally" she urged decision makers to "be careful" with this issue.

Common Ground spreads ideas rather than policy documents.

"A lot of our ideas make their way into government departments," Clifford said.

"What we are about is all the little issues that are often forgotten about," she said.