Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
your selected area. This report comprises of an A4 datasheet, an A3 map sheet
at 1:10,000 scale and up to 16 map sheets at 1:2,500 scale. A separate report is
produced for each site slice. 28
The second example directly involves the Great Britain HGIS and
has been a significant source of income to cover the running costs of our
website, A Vision of Britain through Time. Under a series of laws, start-
ing with the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, owners of “rectorial land”
in England and Wales are liable for the cost of repairs to the chancels of
parish churches. 29 In recent years, a small number of property owners
have found themselves suddenly liable for very substantial sums, the
largest ever claim being £186,969. Establishing exactly which properties
are liable is very time-consuming, but only properties located within cer-
tain “tithe districts,” as defined in 1836, are potentially liable, amounting
to about 35 percent of all parishes. 30 Those property owners form a fairly
lucrative market for specialized insurance.
Curiously, the Great Britain HGIS project has been involved in the
supply of two quite different maps of nineteenth-century parishes to two
different companies, both serving this market. First, research by Roger
Kain and R ichard Oliver of Exeter University was based mainly on local
surveys from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century enclosure
and tithe maps - these maps are from the right period but unavoidably
leave some parts of the country uncovered. The Exeter project created
a “digital map” that in fact consisted of a series of separate Adobe Acro-
bat files, one for each New Popular Edition one-inch map, consisting of
vector boundary lines drawn on top of scans of the one-inch maps. The
Great Britain HGIS created a true GIS from these by converting the vec-
tor data to ArcGIS, constructing a true polygon topology, georeferencing
the data, and assembling the data from all the maps into a single national
coverage. 31 These data have been licensed to Conveyancing Liability
Solutions Ltd. 32
Our own research used a different methodology, starting by digitiz-
ing the civil parish system as it existed in the late 1900s using compre-
hensive and unproblematic Ordnance Survey maps. We then assembled
all the textual descriptions of parish boundary changes in published
census reports, including the very extensive changes resulting from the
Divided Parishes Acts of 1876 and 1882, as listed by the 1891 census.
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