The past is a foreign country:

they do things differently there.
I love old maps. I can't find a date on this particular map of North East Scotland, but I think it might be a hundred years old. And the compass used to belong to my paternal grandfather. It took me a long time to realise just how sophisticated an instrument it was - the way you can look through the sighting prism and carefully line up the compass on a visible landmark and read the bearing without having to take it down from your eye! I probably haven't explained that very well.