Can anyone tell me whether it was common before 1930 for a rural parish in
England to consist of two or more entirely separate areas of land?
I've recently been researching the work of a Union and a Rural District
Council in Oxfordshire c. 1900. The area I'm interested in had 20 civil
parishes with roughly the same names as today's parishes but often with
quite different boundaries.
As I've been unable to find a clear and simple map showing the outline of
these old parishes I looked at the OS 6 inch maps published c. 1912. These
have parish boundaries marked with what can best be described as a line of
full stops but these are sometimes unclear or come to an end in the middle
of an open space. However I took tracings and to my surprise found that the
shapes of parishes were sometimes odd, with long narrow areas of land
extending miles from the central village. But even stranger was the fact
that two parishes had areas of 2 or 3 square miles quite separate and well
away from the rest of the parish. For example the parish of Ewelme had an
area of about one mile square about 6 miles from the main part of the
parish. This little outpost is marked an the OS map as "EWELME (Det. No.
6)". This suggests that Ewelme had other detached areas. This detached area
is shown as being in a different Rural District and in a different Union
from the land which surrounds it.
I think the situation was tidied up after the Local Government Act 1929 but
it now seems a strange anomaly.
Brian Read
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