VICTORIAN

The Challenge

Although often invisible in the landscape, the course of the parish boundary was kept alive within the collective memory of its community through an oral tradition. For most of us today this knowledge no longer forms part of our everyday consciousness and so to discover how boundaries cut across the landscape in our study area we need to turn to the published maps of the Ordnance Survey.

In this investigation we set out to:

• Discover where the boundaries lie as recorded by the Ordnance Survey, both in the present and in the past
• Identify the various units they define and their roles
• Find out how a formal record of the boundary was obtained by the Ordnance Survey from knowledge that largely relied on an oral tradition