As notional triggers, to the majority of people, the Suffolk hundreds are not even lines on a map. However, they are easily traceable on the 1:25000 'Explorer' series by connecting up the contiguous boundaries of the parishes at the edges of clusters of communities that were defined over a thousand years ago. Segments of the boundaries also emerge as landscape features where they are labelled as 'hundred lanes' and 'hundred rivers'. This is a reminder that long before maps were made the divisions were kept alive in the minds of local people as they walked the land and memorised the topographic edges of their social identity.

To bring conservation management to the heart of family life requires an ability in each individual to conceptualise the wholeness of self and environment as a set of beliefs to live by and a spatial context that gives meaning to life. This ability may be described as ecosacy; a third basic ability that should be taught with equal weight alongside literacy and numeracy. The term ecosacy comes directly from the Greek oikos meaning house, and household management includes making decisions about the natural resources that flow across the notional line that encapsulates it. To be ecosate means having the knowledge and mind-set to act, speak and think according to deeply held beliefs and belief systems about people in nature as a community of beings.

Oliver Rackham began the preface of his book, "The History of the Countryside" as follows:

"This book is about the ordinary countryside. In my south Norfolk childhood I wondered why roads had bends, why lanes were sunk into the ground, what dogwood and spindle were doing in hedges, why fields were of odd shapes, why elms stopped abruptly just north of Bungay, and so on. These are difficult questions, and their roots go deep into the past".

His theme was that the ordinary landscape of Britain is the result of thousands of years of local interactions across the notional lines dividing nature from human activities. Cultural ecology draws lines between the inanimate world of climate, soil and landform, and the the world of plants and animals to connect both notional domains with the world of communities who strived to earn a living from the land. The contract manager's monoculture of barley, occupying the space of a hundred medieval fields, is as much a part of nature as the few weedy plants that cling to its treeless margins. Fields contain in themselves a continuity of at least a thousand years of care and use. The difference is that they are now the focus of a push-pull relationship between cost effective investment in machinery and the willingness of tax payers to pay the farmer to cultivate notions about the past.

The old divisions of education into specialist 'ologies' are no longer adequate to facilitate the many lines that have to be drawn between them to connect up a personal body of knowledge about environmental management and its social outcomes. This has led to the concept of 'mind maps' as aids to navigations between conceptual gatherings of knowledge. 'Hundred Lines' is a mind map that takes an historical view of the county of Suffolk from an undeveloped small scale pluralist peasant society to the essentially unitary structure of today. As such it is a model of world development. The software allows the user to move along lines that connects the material and historical environments with the forces and techniques of production (demography coming somewhere in between), the structure of the consequent economy—divisions of labour, exchange, accumulation, distribution of the surplus, and so forth—and the social relations arising from these.

There is no bookish A to Z pathway to navigate the mass of information that will suit everyone. Any topic in the left hand window may be used as a starter and aligned with any other topic in the wide array of knowledge. The resultant notional lines define the personal body of knowledge.