Just to add a few details I should have included yesterday, and address a
couple of the points raised:-

As Nick suggests - yes these names would be in addition to, rather than a
substitute for existing standards for 'administrative' county, unitary
authority etc. It should be stressed however that despite their quaint
sounding name, ceremonial counties are defined, as far as I can tell, in
terms of the current boundaries of administrative areas (ie groupings of
administrative counties and unitary authorities) rather than running along
older boundaries. The exception seems to be Stockton on Tees, which has been
divided along the river. (But it wouldn't be so much fun if it was simple!)

Why not use 1880's boundaries? Well yes these would be useful. But we need
to make historic environment data avaiable in a form that is relevant to
current administrative arrangements (e.g. for consideration in development
control). The English NMR would hope to tackle the issue of provision of
data relating to historic boundaries using geographic information systems
(GIS), and indeed we provide some support for the Great Britain Historical
GIS project at Portsmouth University (perhaps someone from there could
provide more details of this?)

Likely to confuse matters? Well, unavoidably yes. Local government
reorganisation created some anomalies for us. Should we stick to out of date
counties (such as Avon) or go with the new system (administrative counties
plus Unitary Authorities)? The first option would mean we were out of touch
with local administrative arrangements. The second option would mean that we
couldn't do a search on former county areas such as Berkshire (now split
between several U.A.s). The interim solution adopted at the NMR has been to
identify U.A.s as equivalent to Districts, rather than counties, so that our
reference data retains a three level hierarchy. This supports the retrieval
of data for public enquiries, and most of the needs of supporting provision
of data relevant to planning authorities, but isn't perfect.

Missing notes: Thanks Chris - yes I should have included these in the notes.
If people need more information on what is or is not included in each
Ceremonial County area I can provide the mapping I have produced off-list.

Use of the ceremonial counties offers the opportunity to at least adopt a
standard which has some legislative authority, rather than relying on our
own solution to the problem (which inevitably will differ in detail from
other peoples solution).

Down the line somewhat (and this is personal opinion) I would hope that the
heritage sector standards maintainers can hand this whole issue over to the
appropriate authorities (i.e. the O.S.) and get on with work on standards
that relate solely to the heritage sector!

Edmund Lee
EH Data Services Unit