To: local history list: I hope the following is of interest -- apols if it isn't. Corrections and (helpful) comments welcome. Some of you may not need much of the OS stuff – sorry.
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Northumberland OS name books
What are OS name books? The Ordnance Survey was first surveyed and produced in the middle of the 19th century. They worked their way up the country, and did their first survey of round where I am about 1858–1860. As part of the work, they paced around each area, and must have worn out a lot of shoe-leather, asking questions about names and spellings. They also asked about anything that they felt necessary to know when recording something on their maps. They wrote all this down in Name Books. I believe that O.G.S. Crawford, the OS's 1st archaeological officer told them that these were very valuable information sources, and they ought to take care of them. So, guess what? They were mostly destroyed when a bomb hit the OS HQ in Southampton in ?1940.
However... the name books for (I think) the 4 northern English counties survived. The ones for Northumberland have now been painstakingly transcribed, and have just become generally available on the Internet. The URL is:
https://namebooks.org.uk/
Officially, the website isn't available till 1st September, but actually it's there and working now. Although they are about maps (in the first instance), they are full of local history information. See the attached flyer.
I was allowed to look at the nearly-ready website last year, and found it very interesting when I was plodding round the Walbottle Moors waggonways (just west of Newcastle) last summer. As a sample, have a gander at:
http://namebooks.org.uk/browse/main/?OSref=403&Page=8.0&terms=Jocky+Pit&case=i
and also:
http://namebooks.org.uk/browse/main/?OSref=403&Page=81.0&terms=Walbottle
on which you might notice the annotation "A small public house with bad accommodation"!
Do please have a look. (I ought to tell you how to look at the maps. A lot of these are available on National Library of Scotland map pages [https://maps.nls.uk], but that would be another giant tutorial.)
Roger Fern.
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Roger Fern, Newcastle upon Tyne.
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