The crossed-out pitch is the honest part of the map

A site plan drawn by hand: fourteen numbered squares looped around a single track, small symbols for WATER, TOILETS and GATE dotted between them. A red cross is drawn straight through pitch 9.

Nobody redrew this when pitch 9 stopped existing. Somebody just crossed it out.

Why does this site plan look hand-drawn instead of surveyed?

Because it was hand-drawn, once, by whoever ran the site, and it's been photocopied ever since rather than redone.

A campsite plan isn't produced by a mapping agency — it's usually one drawing made by an owner or a warden, good enough to walk a family to their pitch without getting lost, then run off a master copy for as long as the site exists. The wobble in the lines and the slightly uneven lettering aren't flaws in the object; they're evidence that a person drew it rather than a program.

What does the crossed-out pitch actually tell you?

That the plan on your table is older than the ground it's describing, and the site knows it.

Fourteen numbered pitches ringed the track when the plan was drawn. Pitch 9 has since gone — a tree came down across it, or the ground stopped draining, or the site simply decided to leave it wider for turning — and rather than reprint the whole sheet, somebody took a pen to the one square that changed. The cross is the most recent thing on the page. Everything else is only as current as the last time nobody got round to updating it.

A correction beats a clean copy

A freshly printed plan with pitch 9 quietly removed would look more finished and tell you less. It would also cost the site a reprint every time a hedge grew back or a water point moved. The biro cross is cheaper, faster, and — because you can see exactly what changed — more honest than a plan with no visible history left on it at all.

What's the actual choice in laying one of these out?

Which handful of symbols earn a place on the plan, because a real site plan is deliberately sparse.

WATER, TOILETS and GATE are the three that matter enough to mark on this one — the things a visitor would otherwise have to track down a warden to ask about. A plan crowded with every possible symbol stops being something you can read at a glance from the car, which is the one job it actually has to do.

Can I put a real campsite's own plan on a shirt?

Not their drawing without asking, though the format of a hand-drawn site plan belongs to no single site.

A specific campsite's plan is a document that particular business made — its own layout, its own choice of symbols and pitch numbers, licensable the way any operator's printed material is if a real site is the actual point of the shirt. Drawing an invented one, for an invented site with its own pitch numbers and its own crossed-out square, is usually the better route anyway, because it can show the version of the ground that's true for the wearer rather than the one printed for everybody who's ever stayed there.

Does this work for a site nobody else would recognise?

Yes — a private plot, a family's regular pitch, a wedding held in a field with a marquee where GATE would normally go.

The pitch numbers and symbols don't need to correspond to anywhere real. What they need is the same internal logic a real plan has: a loop, a sequence of numbers, and one honest correction somewhere on it if that's true of the place being drawn.

Isn't a hand-drawn plan a strange thing to want permanently on fabric?

Only if the comparison is to a clean digital map, and that's the wrong comparison.

The wobble and the crossed-out square are exactly what a printed survey map can't give you — a specific person's drawing of a specific patch of ground, corrected in their own hand. The same argument applies to a lock-keeper's cast notice: what looks like the rough version is often the one with more history still visible on it.

Does it print well?

Yes, as a flat line drawing rather than anything shaded.

Cream linework on olive keeps the plan close to a photocopied original, and red for the crossed-out pitch is the one accent worth spending a second ink on — it's the newest mark on the page and should read that way. The symbols want redrawing simpler than the original, the same way a blaze mark stays legible by being crude rather than careful: three plain icons survive the weave where fine hatching around them wouldn't.

How do I get one made?

Describe the site at JustOG — how many pitches, which symbols matter, and whether one of them needs crossing out. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Pitch 9 is still on the plan. It just isn't there any more.