[Talk-GB] Traditional/Historic Counties

[Adam Snape]

Thinking about points raised by a couple of respondents. Firstly, the
thorny issue of whether to record features which no longer exist;
secondly, whether it is actually possible to give precise boundaries to
historic/traditional counties and, thirdly, the source(s) which could be
used for information.

1. Whilst the administrative counties based upon the historic counties have
been abolished or changed significantly in recent decades, successive
governments have stated that the traditional counties have never been
abolished and continue to exist along their ancient boundaries. Most
recently:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/eric-pickles-celebrate-st-george-and-englands-traditional-counties

2. The counties existed centuries before detailed maps and thus their
boundaries are usually defined by geographic features such as rivers,
hilltops, watersheds. The boundaries were very stable, with the only even
vaguely significant changes being the 19th century efforts to remove
detached parts of counties (sometimes for reasons lost in time a parish
might notionally belong to another county). When the administrative county
councils were created their areas sometimes differed slightly from the
traditional county where it would cause administrative problems (usually
where the county boundary bisected a major settlement).

3. Luckily the Historic Counties Trust has detailed a sensible standard
definition of the historic counties and mapped their boundaries. These have
been released for reuse as shape files: http://www.county-borders.co.uk/
. I propose making use of the 'A Standard' shape files (the traditional
county boundaries ignoring detached parts) which should be ideal for our
purposes.

Any thoughts?

Adam


On 10 February 2017 at 15:03, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:

> On 09/02/17 23:40, Adam Snape wrote:
> > My view was that - like teh Irish Townlands project - there's still
> > a cultural relevance to these historical units and I thought it a good
> > potential use of boundary=historical, but if the consensus is that it's
> > not a good idea then that's fine.
>
> Anomalies such as 'Middlesex' sort of challenge any rule especially when
> there is no 'real' boundary to map at all. But the ability to access
> historic material, the vast majority of which is still current remains a
> sticking point. end_date is still the right way of handling the changes
> that are due with the NEXT round of boundary changes, so including
> previous historic changes in that data still makes sense while there is
> no reliable way of archive the data to another database ...
>
> --
> Lester Caine - G8HFL
> -----------------------------
> Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
> L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
> EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
> Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
> Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk
>
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