On Friday I went to Stanfords and picked up a couple of maps of the Belfast area, one of which was a street plan of the city itself.

Today, at my Sunday roleplaying session I was showing these maps to the guys, pointing out where QCon is taking place (and also where the accommodation is) and someone asked a question whose precise wording I cannot now recall, but basically equated to: "Where are the dodgy bits then?"

At this, I responded with: "That's easy, we just have to find the peace walls and those will be the dodgy areas."

There was just one slight problem.

The map had streets.

The map had parks.

The map had railways lines, fences within parks, bowling greens, airports, railway lines, hospitals, universities and bus stations.

But the various twenty foot high concrete and corrugated iron walls, some more than a kilometre long?

Apparently those didn't make the cut.

We did find two streets on the map that had thin black lines drawn perpendicularly across them, which we figured could be one of two things:

a) A traffic calming measure designed to prevent car commuters using the street as a "rat run".

b) A twenty-foot high concrete and corrugated iron barrier designed to separate two communities embarked in a low-level campaign of sectarian urban warfare.

Call me picky, but I'd appreciate it if my map told me which of the two it was.