ss62sw.pdf
(1.15 MB)Site created and maintained by Martin Ebdon
Last updated 25 November 2007
This website describes a book of historical maps, provisionally titled Atlas of North Devon in 1840. The book has been in development for several years and will not be ready for publication for a few more years. The Atlas will provide a detailed portrait of the landscape of North Devon about the year 1840. The main part of the Atlas will be a series of maps that systematically cover the region at a scale of 1:20,000, or a little over 3 inches to 1 mile. In addition, the towns and larger villages of North Devon, including the historic ports of Barnstaple and Bideford, will be shown on large-scale maps that show even greater detail. There will also be large-scale maps of certain places of particular historical interest, such as Braunton Great Field.
The maps are being compiled mainly from tithe maps and tithe apportionments, but they also incorporate information from other sources of about the same date as the tithe surveys. The intention is not to publish the tithe maps as such, but to compile original maps using whatever sources are available for the target date of c.1840. Tithe maps and apportionments are, however, by far the most important source of information for the Atlas.
The Atlas is intended to be a work of reference for research historians, for teachers and students, for local and family historians, for archaeologists, and for all those concerned with the development or conservation of the landscape of North Devon. The Atlas should also appeal to anyone who may be interested to see what his or her own town, village, or farm was like in the early Victorian period.
This is not a full-time project with sponsorship, but just something I have been working on in my spare time for many years. My interest in maps goes back to early childhood. I spent my later childhood on a farm in North Devon and here I acquired a love for the countryside, spending countless hours exploring the fields and woods in the few square miles surrounding our farm, accompanied by a 1:25,000-scale Ordnance Survey map (which at the time was hopelessly out of date). Years later, I was completing a doctoral thesis at Sussex University (in a totally unrelated subject) when, just out of curiosity, I looked up the Domesday Book for Devon in the university library. This led to me reading more books relating to landscape history and soon I discovered the works of W. G. Hoskins and Oliver Rackham. My childhood interest in maps was reawakened, and the idea of creating an atlas of historical maps of North Devon developed gradually in my mind during 1994. It occurred to me that I had the right combination of abilities: a fascination for the subject of maps and landscape history; personal knowledge of the Devon countryside; research skills; technical skills in computer cartography (without which the project would be almost impossible); and being crazy enough to take on a project that most people would regard as hopelessly over-ambitious for one person working part-time. Actually I would probably not have started the project had I known that ten years later I would still be working on it.
The original plan in 1994 was that I would cover the entire county of Devon in four, self-contained volumes, of which North Devon would be the first. This remains the plan in theory, but knowing how much work is involved it now seems almost certain that the volumes covering South Devon and West Devon (including Dartmoor) will never get done, or at least not by me. I like to think that the East Devon volume (including Exeter, Crediton, Tiverton, Honiton, and Sidmouth) will eventually see the light of day.
The Atlas will cover 'North Devon', by which I mean the area shown in light green on the map below. This is a larger area than the administrative district of North Devon as it also includes the northern half of Torridge district and a small part of Mid Devon district. The island of Lundy is included. The Atlas will not show any part of Cornwall or Somerset, even close to the county borders (these areas will be left blank on the maps).
The following is an alphabetical list of parishes covered by the Atlas. The list includes both 'ancient parishes' (which correspond more or less with tithe maps) and present-day civil parishes. Parishes only partially covered by the Atlas are shown with asterisks. The list omits a few parishes for which only very small areas will be included.
Abbots Bickington, Abbotsham, Alverdiscott, Alwington, Arlington, Ashford, Ashreigney, Atherington, Barnstaple, Beaford, Berrynarbor, Bideford, Bishop's Nympton, Bishop's Tawton, Bittadon, Bradworthy, Bratton Fleming, Braunton, Brayford, Brendon, Buckland Brewer, *Buckland Filleigh, Bulkworthy, Burrington, Challacombe, Charles, *Chawleigh, Cheldon, Chittlehamholt, Chittlehampton, Chulmleigh, Clovelly, Combe Martin, Countisbury, Creacombe, *Cruwys Morchard, Dolton, *Dowland, East Anstey, East Buckland, East Down, East Putford, East Worlington, *Eggesford, Filleigh, Fremington, Frithelstock, George Nympton, Georgeham, Goodleigh, Great Torrington, Hartland, Heanton Punchardon, High Bickington, High Bray, *Holsworthy Hamlets, Horwood, Huish, Huntshaw, Ilfracombe, Instow, Kentisbury, King's Nympton, Knowstone, Landcross, Landkey, Langtree, *Lapford, Littleham, Little Torrington, Loxhore, Lundy, Lynton and Lynmouth, Mariansleigh, Martinhoe, Marwood, Merton, Meshaw, *Milton Damerel, Molland, Monkleigh, Morthoe, Newton St Petrock, Newton Tracey, Northam, North Molton, *Oakford, Parkham, Parracombe, Peters Marland, *Petrockstowe, Pilton, *Puddington, Queen's Nympton, Rackenford, Roborough, Romansleigh, Rose Ash, St Giles in the Wood, Satterleigh, *Shebbear, Shirwell, South Molton, Stoke Rivers, *Stoodleigh, *Sutcombe, Swimbridge, Tawstock, Templeton, Thelbridge, *Tiverton, Trentishoe, Twitchen, Warkleigh, Washford Pyne, Weare Giffard, Welcombe, *Wembworthy, West Anstey, West Buckland, West Down, Westleigh, West Putford, West Worlington, *Winkleigh, Witheridge, Woolfardisworthy (West), Yarnscombe.
Use the following link to download an example map in the form of a PDF file. The map covers National Grid square SS62SW and shows the area around Brightley Barton and Warkleigh in the Taw valley. The map is derived mainly from the tithe maps and apportionments of Atherington, Chittlehampton, High Bickington, and Warkleigh parishes. There is no information in the margins, and the colours are oriented towards computer display rather than process-colour printing, but otherwise it illustrates what the 1:20,000-scale maps in the Atlas are intended to be like. When viewing the map in Adobe Reader use the 'zoom' and 'hand' tools to zoom in and move around.
ss62sw.pdf
(1.15 MB)
If you don't have Adobe Reader installed on your computer you can download it from here.
The main part of the Atlas is a series of 91 maps at the scale 1:20,000, known as the general maps, each covering an area of 5 by 5 kilometres. Together the general maps provide complete and systematic coverage of North Devon (as defined above). The kind of information shown on the general maps is broadly comparable with that of modern 1:25,000-scale Ordnance Survey maps, the main difference being that there are no contour lines or other indications of altitude. Several towns and villages are shown in greater detail on 1:5000-scale maps, known as the special maps. These are:
Appledore, Barnstaple, Bideford, Bishop's Nympton, Bishop's Tawton, Bradworthy, Braunton, Buckland Brewer, Combe Martin, Chittlehampton, Chulmleigh, Croyde, Dolton, Fremington, Great Torrington, Hartland, High Bickington, Ilfracombe, Landkey, Lynton and Lynmouth, Newport, Northam, North Molton, Swimbridge, West Down, Witheridge.
Another four special maps show certain areas of particular historical interest at intermediate scales. These areas are Braunton Great Field and Braunton Down, and the parkland around Castle Hill (Filleigh) and Eggesford House. The date of the information shown on the maps is c.1840.
The maps show practically all buildings. The built-up parts of towns and villages are depicted in simplified form on the general maps but are shown to scale on the special maps. Churches and other selected public buildings are distinguished. All roads are mapped. Turnpike roads (i.e. toll roads) are distinguished from minor roads, and the turnpike trusts controlling them are named. Rivers, streams, and canals are shown, but there are no railways: they did not arrive in North Devon until the 1850s. The parish boundaries mapped are those of ancient ecclesiastical parishes. Hundred boundaries and municipal borough boundaries are also shown.
All field boundaries are mapped. Field-names are shown in full on the special maps, and in a selective and abbreviated way on the general maps. The maps indicate land-use rather than vegetation as such, using the categories pasture, meadow, orchard, furze, timber woodland, coppice, plantation, and moor. Ancient monuments such as earthworks and standing stones are shown.
Many other minor topographical features are included where they are marked on tithe maps, such as footpaths, footbridges, boundary stones, wells, ponds, quarries, and a few individual trees. Tithe maps are capricious in their depiction of such features and a great many would have existed in 1840 that were not recorded; the Atlas shows them very selectively.
The text of the book will give an introduction to the historical sources from which the Atlas is compiled, and it will provide a brief guide to the content of the maps and to the nineteenth-century landscape that they depict. There will be a comprehensive index of place-names, although because of limited space this will not include field-names.
Tithe maps are the main source for the great majority of the area covered by the Atlas. The accompanying tithe apportionments supply nearly all the place-names, together with the land-use information [1]. The coverage of England and Wales by tithe maps is very uneven; Devon is one of the few counties for which coverage is almost complete [2]. In North Devon, some of the gaps in tithe map coverage can be filled by estate maps made at about the same time as the tithe surveys. The only exceptions are the built-up area of South Molton and a few hundred acres of former monastic land at Frithelstock. For the purposes of the general maps I am filling these gaps using the oldest available Ordnance Survey County Series maps. There is no special map of South Molton in the Atlas because of this lacuna. If anyone knows of a detailed map of South Molton earlier than the Ordnance Survey 1:2500 of 1888, I would be very pleased to hear about it.
Coverage of the built-up parts of Barnstaple, Bideford, and Great Torrington in the Atlas is based mainly on maps produced by the Edinburgh-based surveyor John Wood in the early 1840s. Incidentally, I would be interested to learn more about Wood's work in Devon. For such a prolific mapmaker there is almost nothing about him in print [3]. I know that he mapped many towns in Scotland, Wales, and northern England, and that in Devon he produced maps of Barnstaple, Bideford, Exeter, Great Torrington, Tiverton, and (I think) Tavistock; any others?
The main source map for Lundy is the later of the two Ordnance Surveyors' Drawings of the island, made in 1820 and revised in 1834 [4]. Uniquely in North Devon, the field boundaries on this Ordnance Surveyors' Drawing are not a work of fiction.
The depiction of the coastline in the Atlas (cliffs and the high and low water marks) is a simplification of that on Ordnance Survey County Series maps, based on the assumption that the topography changed little between c.1840 and c.1890. I am aware that this assumption is problematic in the case of the Taw estuary, where there was some land reclamation in this period.
Certain special sources are used for the mapping of particular kinds of feature. For example, turnpike roads are mapped using the listings of the roads concerned in Acts of Parliament by which the trusts were set up or renewed. The mapping of ancient monuments is based on a number of published sources (I have not yet got around to using the county Sites and Monuments Register). A few additional place-names are taken from the Ordnance Survey one-inch Old Series maps [5].
The tithe maps are a key source for local history [6]. For most of North Devon they are the earliest large-scale maps that were made, and are significantly earlier (c.1840) than the first large-scale Ordnance Survey maps (c.1890). The tithe maps have never been published, necessitating a trip to the record office in Exeter for anyone who wants to consult them. Moreover, they are difficult maps to work with, for several reasons: the manuscripts are large and unwieldy; some of the manuscripts are damaged and cannot be consulted by the public; the area shown on each map ends abruptly at the parish boundary; there are large differences between parishes in the quality, scale, and style of the maps; and a lot of information is not marked on the maps themselves but is in separate written documents (the tithe apportionments). The Atlas will make much of the content of the tithe maps and apportionments of North Devon widely available in a consistent and easy-to-use format. It will be especially useful for researchers wanting to use tithe survey information for an area larger than a single parish.
The rural landscape of Devon evolved in a gradual and piecemeal way over many centuries, conserving many aspects of the settlement pattern from the early Middle Ages [7]. Therefore, the Atlas could be used in conjunction with sources such as Domesday Book and early manorial surveys to gain information about landscapes considerably older than 1840.
The maps in the Atlas will show historical parish boundaries with greater detail and accuracy than any previously published maps [8]. Maps of parish boundaries that pre-date the rationalizations of the late nineteenth century are useful for local historians because many kinds of historical document were organized on a parish basis (for example, parish registers), because the boundaries give clues to the organization of medieval estates [9], and because the boundaries can be used as evidence for dating features like hedges [10].
The maps in the Atlas will show field boundaries at a time when the total length of hedge in Devon was probably near its maximum. Recent destruction of hedges to make larger fields is well-known, but it is surprising how many hedges were destroyed in the period of agricultural prosperity between c.1840 and c.1870, and so were never recorded on Ordnance Survey maps. (I estimate that the average field size in North Devon at the time of the tithe surveys was 3.2 acres.)
At Braunton, North Devon has one of Britain's very few surviving open-field systems [11]. The Atlas will provide a detailed map of these fields at a time when they were much more subdivided than today.
The special maps in the Atlas will show the forms of towns and villages at a time when they were still largely confined to their medieval core areas. This is especially true of Barnstaple and Ilfracombe, where suburban expansion was very marked in the Victorian period. Town and village plans that pre-date modern development can give important insights into their origins [12].
The Atlas will show many thousands of place-names transcribed from the tithe apportionments, many of which are not found on modern maps. This includes a considerable number of field-names, which have never been shown on Ordnance Survey maps in North Devon.
Although ancient monuments are not mapped in great detail, the Atlas will show several earthworks and stone monuments that have been destroyed since 1840 and are not shown on modern maps. Perhaps of greater value to archaeologists, however, will be the mapping of several farmsteads and many field boundaries that existed in 1840 but have since been destroyed. Some field-names in the tithe apportionments indicate the sites of antiquities and settlements that disappeared long before 1840.
Publication of the Atlas has not yet been arranged because the maps are not yet near completion. The book is intended to be between 150 and 200 pages in a 300 by 300 millimetre page-format. It is expected that the main difficulty with publication will be the expense of colour printing. It would be a shame to publish the maps without colour, not only for aesthetic reasons but because the high density of information in the maps would make black and white versions hard to interpret. Publication in digital form would be less expensive, but much of the potential market for the book might not be comfortable with this format, or even aware of it. Personally I would prefer to have a 'real book' that I could take out into the field (literally!).
I have confirmation from the National Archives and from the Ordnance Survey that the use I am making of their maps does not infringe their copyright.
These may be of interest to some readers. The file format used for the digital maps is DXF, mainly because it is an open format and a relatively simple one for software to read and write. The maps consist mainly of polylines (connected line sequences), together with inserts (e.g. tree symbols), hatching (mostly solid colour fills), and text. These objects are organized in about fifty layers. The coordinate system is the British National Grid. For the general maps, each DXF file covers a 5 by 5 kilometre tile. The special maps are a separate set of DXF files, one for each town, village, or other place covered.
I take care that polylines are 'properly connected' in the sense that no two polylines are allowed to strictly intersect each other, polylines connect with each other only at their vertices, and connections are exact (with no small gaps or overshoots). There are exceptions to this rule, but they are well defined exceptions based on the layers of the map. For example, parish, hundred and county boundaries may intersect most other types of polyline (although they must properly connect with each other). Proper connectivity is intended to make it relatively straightforward to convert the map data from its present polyline-based representation to a polygon-based representation in the future, if desired.
I am using AutoCAD LT as my map editor, partly because of my familiarity with it, but mainly on the grounds of cost (most cartography software is much more expensive). I find that AutoCAD LT has no serious drawbacks for cartography except for its inadequate choice of colours. I use Adobe Illustrator to prepare versions of the maps for publication in print or PDF.
I have written my own software for certain tasks, of which the two most important are raster to vector conversion and transforming the various source maps into a common coordinate system so that they can be joined together. The second of these is the major technical challenge of the project. The tithe map of each parish was surveyed independently of all the others, and although in principle the maps of neighbouring parishes should fit together like jigsaw pieces, inaccurate surveying and ageing of the manuscripts mean that in practice they do not. Digital copies of the maps have to be distorted to some extent before they can be stitched together, using a geometrical technique called rubber sheeting [13]. The distortion is a good thing in that it improves the planimetric accuracy of the digital maps compared with the originals. It is not my intention, however, to make the maps as good as modern Ordnance Survey maps in that respect. In fact the planimetric accuracy of some tithe maps is so poor that such a goal would be scarcely achievable (Little Torrington, Northam and West Worlington are examples).
Or rather, lack of progress update: I did very little on the Atlas project in 2006 because my time was taken up with a quite separate historical mapping project (the results of that will be published in late 2008), while a big chunk of my so-called spare time in 2007 has been occupied with moving house. However, I am now back working on the Atlas again. The diagram below is a summary of the stages of the project, with colours indicating progress on them at the time of writing. I should stress that the boxes in the diagram do not all represent equal amounts of work! Actually, the most time-consuming stages are among those that have now been completed.
I can be contacted at 
but please don't ask about the publication date of the Atlas
because this is not yet on the horizon! Otherwise I welcome comments or questions.
The National Archives holds tithe maps and apportionments. The Devon Record Office also holds tithe maps and apportionments, as well as other manuscript maps of places in Devon. The same website has details of the North Devon Record Office which holds some manuscript maps of places in North Devon. The Westcountry Studies Library holds old Ordnance Survey maps and other printed maps covering Devon. The National Library of Scotland website has information about John Wood with images of his maps of Scottish towns. For online information about many aspects of the history of Devon see the Devon County Council local studies website, and also GENUKI Devon, including its pages about particular towns and parishes.
[1] National Archives: IR 29 (apportionments) and IR 30 (maps).
[2] R. J. P. Kain and R. R. Oliver, The Tithe Maps of England and Wales: A Cartographic Analysis and County-by-County Catalogue (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995).
[3] There is a brief biography of John Wood in A. S. Bendall, Dictionary of Land Surveyors and Local Map-Makers of Great Britain and Ireland 1530-1850 (2 vols., British Library, London, 1997). Various reproductions of Wood's town maps have been published but none of the Devon ones.
[4] British Library Map Library: OSD 299b. For the origin of this map see R. R. Oliver's introduction in The Old Series Ordnance Survey Maps of England and Wales, Vol. 6: Wales (Harry Margary, Lympne Castle, Kent, 1992) p. ix.
[5] The Old Series Ordnance Survey Maps of England and Wales, Vol. 2: Devon, Cornwall and West Somerset (Harry Margary, Lympne Castle, Kent, 1977).
[6] R. J. P. Kain and H. C. Prince, Tithe Surveys for Historians (Phillimore, Chichester, 2000).
[7] W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England (Macmillan, London, 1963) 15-52; H. S. A. Fox, 'Medieval farming and rural settlement', in R. J. P. Kain and W. Ravenhill (eds.), Historical Atlas of South-West England (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1999), 273-280.
[8] The best such maps currently available are the digital maps distributed with R. J. P. Kain and R. R. Oliver, The Historic Parishes of England and Wales: An Electronic Map of Boundaries Before 1850 With a Gazetteer and Metadata (History Data Service, UK Data Archive, Colchester, 2001). However they are at a relatively small scale and some detached parts of parishes are omitted or mapped inaccurately.
[9] For example, see Hoskins in ref. 7 and D. Hooke, Pre-Conquest Charter-Bounds of Devon and Cornwall (Boydell, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1994).
[10] The parishes of Devon were almost fully formed by 1291: N. Orme, 'The medieval parishes of Devon', Devon Historian 33 (1986) 3-9. The boundaries are unlikely to have changed much between then and 1840.
[11] H. P. R. Finberg, 'The open field in Devon', in W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, Devonshire Studies (Jonathan Cape, London, 1952), 265-288.
[12] For example, J. Haslam, 'The towns of Devon', in J. Haslam (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England (Phillimore, Chichester, 1984) 249-283.
[13] M. S. White and P. Griffin, 'Piecewise linear rubber-sheet map transformation', The American Cartographer 12 (1985) 123-131.