Terrain Studio

Nautical chart prints · Drowned Coast

Your home as a sea chart, if the sea came inland.

Choose a place, however far from the coast, and the Studio raises the sea until its valleys flood. Hills become islands and headlands, the valley floors become channels and sounds, and nearby villages give their names to the new harbours: Henley-on-Thames Haven, Edale-under-Sea, Port Bathampton. The result is drawn as a proper nautical chart in the Admiralty style, with soundings, depth contours, lights and a north star. About the style ↓

Every depth is real: a height measured from the air, turned upside down. The sea is not, and the chart says so. It is a gift for sailors who live inland, for rowers and walkers, and for anyone who would rather their village had a harbour. It works on real mountain coasts too: on Skye and Arran the sea simply rises, and the glens flood. Prints from £120; you see the finished chart, with your own title, before you pay.

Ask for a chart of your place

The style

After the Admiralty chart, borrowed with respect.

Drowned Coast is drawn in the manner of the British Admiralty chart. The Admiralty’s Hydrographic Office was founded in 1795, with Alexander Dalrymple as its first Hydrographer, and published its first chart in 1800. For more than two centuries since, its surveyors have charted coasts all over the world, and the Admiralty chart, with its quiet colours, dense small print and exact conventions, became the model for nautical charts almost everywhere.

We have kept the conventions a sailor would recognise, and applied them to water that isn’t there:

Soundings
The small figures scattered across the water: depths in metres below chart datum. On a Drowned Coast chart each one is a real land height, measured from the air and turned upside down.
Depth contours
Fine lines joining equal depths, so the shape of the sea floor (here, the valley floor) can be read at a glance.
Colour tints
The Admiralty palette: buff land, green for ground that dries at low tide, blue for the shallows and white for deep water.
Drying heights
Underlined figures on the green: how far the foreshore stands above the water when the tide goes out.
Chart datum & tide
Depths are measured from a low-water datum set below the chosen sea level, with a tidal range of 3 metres, just as a real chart measures from low water.
Lights
Magenta light stars and their coded descriptions on headlands and harbour mouths, written the way a real chart describes a lighthouse: its flashing pattern, period, height and range.
Names
Sounds, pits, deeps, holms and havens, named the way charts name them, after the real villages, woods and farms nearby: Henley-on-Thames Haven, Kelston Pit, Edale-under-Sea.
Furniture
A north star, graduated borders, a scale bar, a title panel and a caution box, which here says plainly that the sea is invented and the chart is not for navigation.
Close-up of a Drowned Coast chart: two lights on Dripshill Island marked with magenta stars and the descriptions Fl(4) 20s 11m 9M and Iso 6s 30m 15M, with soundings and depth contours
Lights on Dripshill Island, from our Malvern chart. Fl(4) 20s 11m 9M: a group of four flashes every 20 seconds, 11 metres above the water, seen 9 nautical miles away. Iso 6s: light and dark in equal halves of a 6-second cycle. Every light is invented, written in the notation a real one would use.

Terrain Studio has no connection with the UK Hydrographic Office, and Drowned Coast charts use none of its data. The style is a homage; the ground is measured; the sea is imagined.