Shetland is more than 100 miles away from the Scottish mainland, as the crow flies. It takes 12 hours to get there from the mainland on a ferry. It is, by any measure, quite far away.

But looking at a lot of maps, that might not be immediately clear. Often as not, Shetland might show up enclosed in a box in the Moray Firth or in the North Sea off Aberdeenshire.

This isn’t a new thing. The National Library of Scotland’s map collection includes various examples dating back to the middle of the 17th Century where Shetland – and indeed Orkney – are corralled into boxes.

Examples abound, from bank notes to the covers of government reports. But one representative of the islands fears that such maps are not properly representative of the islands.

Tavish Scott, the Lib Dem MSP for Shetland, says that putting the islands in a box causes people to forget about the challenges they face on account of their remote location.

He said: “The logistics of getting to and from Shetland are all too often forgotten, and this has had an impact on the crucial economies of the islands, for instance the movement of oil, gas and seafood.

“Recognising where Shetland is located would go a long way to understanding the challenges we face as an island.”

The rural local authority areas look to have bigger areas of wealth, however as there is a standard size for msoas (2000 or so people) all the size reveals is how big an area you have to draw in each place to cover 2000 people. In rural areas with fewer people the area needs to be bigger. It doesn’t mean there are more rich people, just that the population is more spread out.

Secondly the income figures take no account of commuting, its where you work that determines your wealth not where you live. In fact the broken link between living and working in the same area, largely the fault of planning which concentrates employment in larger settlements has made places increasingly unsustainable. Often the areas where the richest live have very few jobs and low paid ones at that. Witness the notion of the B&B Village as a concept, where the only things around during the day are the elderly and a few tumbleweeds. Anyway if you would prefer to take this article at face value read on:

Enter the name of a town or city in the search box in the map above, or zoom in to find out where those with the greatest incomes live.

Tap on each area – marked in red – for information on average weekly earnings in that region.

There may be some correlation between the areas where people earn more, and where the wealthiest live.

It’s Britain – but not as we know it today.

A historic atlas of Great Britain has been published online for the first time, offering a unique view of England, Scotland and Wales over the last 500 years.

The collection of maps also reveal counties no longer in existence such as Westmorland and Huntingdonshire.

Digitised by family history website Ancestry, the Atlas and Index of Parish Registers, contains 57 separate county maps, which show how Britain’s ancient parish and county boundaries have changed shape over the centuries.

Navigable online, the Atlas lets users scroll over whole counties and zoom in and out to identify local parish towns and churches.

The yrust currently produces PDF guides which list facilities across the waterway network. Whilst the information is kept as up-to-date as possible, this new project is intended to provide a more interactive means of encouraging people to discover their local waterway with access points, bridges and tunnels all marked.

The project comes at a time when British Waterways’ canals and rivers in England and Wales will be transferring into the care of the Trust (on 1 July).  While many people see this transfer as exciting times for waterways, in practice the trust will need to attract new investment and give local people a greater say in waterways management.

For me, this article raises important questions around the localism agenda: how do you get people/volunteers involved (beyond the usual suspects)? What steps can you take to ensure locality working is not top down?

And at a time of squeezed budgets, how can you prevent investment (and a lack of it perhaps) from becoming the only talking shop?

You may recall I wrote some weeks ago about Bishop Auckland having to withdraw their printed claims as the birth place of Stan Laurel. Now the Loch Lomond National Park  have had to remove this chart because as explained by the article: “Local residents and boat owners were furious to discover that the chart had included “derogatory” and “megalomaniac” new names for key landmarks on the loch, one of the most popular and heavily used stretches of water in the UK.

The most offensive, they said, was to rename a sandy beach on Inchmoan island as Giro Bay after the Scottish slang term for a dole cheque.

There have been repeated rows over youths from neighbouring towns littering the banks of Loch Lomond with abandoned tents and unsightly rubbish tips after all-night parties and camping expeditions.”

On a more serious and contemporary English note, the governance arrangements for National Parks are being considered at the moment with potential scope to make them more democratic – is this a good thing?

And should the balance often pursued in such Parks in support of conservation over development (in view of the coalition government’s general disposition in favour of development) be deliberately re-tilted?