OUR INVESTIGATION

Looking at maps

We began by looking at a modern 1:2500 Ordnance Survey map of the area. This map identifies boundaries dividing the landscape between the three civil parishes of Wantage, Grove, and Lockinge. We are familiar with civil parishes today as the units at the bottom of local government hierarchy that are governed by a parish council which has the authority to levy a small rate to provide for such amenities as playing fields, allotment gardens, street lighting and bus shelters.

Our next step was to go back over a hundred years to the first edition map of the area surveyed in 1875-7 and published by the Ordnance Survey at a scale of six inches to the mile (1:10,560). Alongside Wantage and Grove, separate civil parishes are shown for Charlton, West Lockinge and East Lockinge. Census returns and maps surveyed within the intervening dates help provide the answers for these differences.

In 1934 the civil parishes of Charlton, West Lockinge and East Lockinge were abolished. East and West Lockinge were combined to create the single civil parish of Lockinge which also included part of the old civil parish of Charlton. The remaining area of Charlton was then divided between Wantage and Grove.

Click here to view changes to the civil parish boundaries.

We have seen that in the 1870s separate civil parishes existed for Wantage, Grove, Charlton and West Lockinge, but did their boundaries relate to ecclesiastical parishes, the units of church administration? Closer inspection of the first edition map reveals that the Ordnance Survey defined a hierarchy of land units, including civil and ecclesiastical parishes, and also townships and hamlets, and indicated these on the published maps through the adoption of conventions using varying styles of lettering. How do these various units relate to each other? Fortunately, details of how the Ordnance Survey went about ascertaining and recording the alignment of boundaries are preserved in the OS Boundary Archive held at The National Archives in Kew. It is to these records that we turn next.