The phone call came in the wee hours. One of our volunteers had stumbled into a production office at the far end of a busy festival’s perimeter fence, at least an hour’s walk away.

Distressed and anxious, we needed to escort her back to her tent. Chatting the following day about her misadventure, she explained that she had gone out after her shift to enjoy the music.

Becoming separated from her friend, she got lost in the crowd. Disoriented, she kept walking until security staff brought her to the safety of the nearby office.

Unused to crowds and strange places, and without a site map, her evening of fun quickly turned into a terrifying experience.

The incident got me thinking. Getting lost, even among thousands of people, can be upsetting. To know our place, we need navigation skills to locate it in relation to other places.

We also need a critical understanding of the cultural attachment we have to it. With an increasing reliance on modern GPS systems, we may be losing the skills to locate ourselves in our landscapes, and risk cultural disconnection from our own, and other places.

Imagine then a new way of examining places. Known as 'deep mapping', and still loosely defined, this is applied by those who map their chosen place down and through geological deep time in such exquisite detail that it can take a lifetime of observation, dissection and understanding to complete their task.

Places may be landscapes, coastlines, towns, or townlands. Each mapper is unique, bringing together mixed portfolios of skills, specialisms, interests, and disciplines such as botany, geology, geography, history, art, photography, language, agriculture, local history, genealogy, archaeology, folklore, place naming and surnames, to name but a few.

Anything goes, and endless possibilities are created depending on the unique mix of skills that they use to interpret their place.

Living in Connemara and the Aran Islands, Englishman Tim Robinson brought his unique skills in cartography, painting and mathematics to the task.

Learning Irish, he mapped and recorded field names, islands, and bays, and through his writing and recordings he entwined local history, folklore and storytelling to produce place-based cultural masterpieces, and created the greatest layered deep maps in Ireland today.

So too, American anthropologist Henry Glassie, who lived in Arney, County Fermanagh from 1972 to 1979.

With an academic background in folklore, music, ethnography and architecture, he also developed an in-depth knowledge of Irish history and literature before recording and writing about the people who lived along the Arney River in a time of trouble.

His five books, including 'Passing the Time in Ballymenone', and 'The Stars of Ballymenone', are regarded as the finest cultural studies of any community in Ireland. His mapped area was only three-square miles. A rich offering, indeed.

Fermanagh has its own home-spun deep mappers. Using their own deep mapping disciplines and cultural lens, they observed and dissected their places and presented their reflections to us through a variety of cultural and academic approaches.

These include the archaeological and historical field work of Gaby Burns and Jim Nolan, of Cavan Burren and Cuilcagh; the botanical research of Ralph Forbes and Robert Northridge; the writing and drawings of Fermanagh’s folk life by Johnny McKeagney; and Fred Carroll, who identified a new archaeological monument-type known as Burnt Mounds, or ancient feasting sites.

Our local historians too, including Mary Gordon McBride, Seamas McCanny, Margaret Gallagher, Frankie Roofe, Marion Maxwell, and Johnny Cunningham have added greatly to our knowledge of history and heritage.

Grounded by their curiosity, our writers, such as Matt Duggan, George Sheridan, and John McGourty, presented their places to us in timeless detail.

Every place tells a story, including yours, so why not unpack its history and heritage?

Bringing your own skills and knowledge will add something unique to the task. It may also be the perfect antidote to getting lost.