Another batch of "places", about 600, have been defined in A Vision of
Britain through Time. As before, this is not really adding information to
the site, but hopefully bringing it together and making it more accessible.
We have already defined just about everywhere that gave its name to an
Ancient or Civil Parish as a place, and this time the two main emphases
are:
<> Locating townships in Wales. We concentrated on ones to which we could
link descriptive gazetteer entries, but it still proved fairly
problematic. We have supplied a complete version of all our administrative
unit data for Wales to David Parsons at the University of Wales Centre for
Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth, and we are hoping he will
be able to locate rather more of them.
<> Locating places that gave their names to relatively recent
ecclesiastical parishes. This has now been done for Herefordshire,
Worcestershire, Kent and Hampshire. This was more straightforward, and
added a good number of villages as well as many suburbs within south
Birmingham and south-east London, but still proved fairly time consuming.
This work is linked to imminent changes to our user interface which will
more clearly present administrative units as subsidiary to places, which
makes it desirable to link as many units to places as possible.
New funding means we will be adding a lot more units significant before
1800, especially manors and vills. It is virtually impossible to establish
boundaries for most of these, but most can be associated with point
locations; the ones that cannot be associated with modern villages can
often be related to farms shown on 19th and 20th century maps. However, we
need to find ways to speed this work up.
As always, comments would be useful.
Humphrey Southall
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