Updated Boundaries of Ancient Woodland polygons covering England. This is the updated spatial dataset that describes the geographic extent and location of ancient woodland in England (excluding the Isles of Scilly). Ancient Woodland features will be approved county-by-county for publication throughout the first year of production until the data product coverage extends across England. Where available this dataset takes precedence over the Ancient Woodland – England dataset. The update revises the inventory to address problems and gaps in the previous iteration. Technological advances mean that small ancient woodlands (0.25-2ha) are being represented within the inventory for the first time as well as wood pasture and parkland being represented as its own category.

The inventory identifies ancient woodland sites in England. Ancient woodland is identified by studying the presence or absence of woods from historic maps, information about the wood's name, shape, internal boundaries, location relative to other features, ground survey, and aerial photography. The information recorded about each wood and stored on the Inventory Database includes its grid reference, its area in hectares and how much is semi-natural or replanted. Prior to the digitisation of the boundaries, only paper maps depicting each ancient wood at 1:50 000 scale were available. Attribution statement: © Natural England 2024. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2024. OS AC0000851168. It includes Ancient Semi-Natural Woodland (ASNW), which retains a native tree and shrub cover; Plantation on Ancient Woodland Sites (PAWS), where the original tree cover has been felled and replaced by planting, often with conifers; Ancient Wood Pasture (AWPP), where the trees are managed in tandem with a long established tradition of grazing, characteristically with at least some veteran trees or shrubs or; Infilled Ancient Wood Pasture (IAWPP) which has become infilled with trees arising from planting or natural regeneration.

Colourful and easy to use, Bartholomew’s maps became a trademark series. The maps were popular and influential, especially for recreation, and the series sold well, particularly with cyclists and tourists. To begin with, Bartholomew printed their half-inch maps in Scotland as stand-alone sheets known as 'District Sheets' and by 1886 the whole of Scotland was covered. They then revised the maps into an ordered set of 29 sheets covering Scotland in a regular format. This was first published under the title Bartholomew’s Reduced Ordnance Survey of Scotland. The half-inch maps of Scotland formed the principal content for Bartholomew's Survey Atlas of Scotland published in 1895. Bartholomew then moved south of the Border to the more lucrative but competitive market in England and Wales, whilst continuing to revise the Scottish sheets. This Bartholomew series at half-inch to the mile, covered Great Britain in 62 sheets in the 1940s, Bartholomew’s first to cover Great Britain at this scale (their previous series covering Scotland and then England and Wales). The series provides an attractive and useful snapshot of 1940s Britain. By this time, Bartholomew had altered the range of information on their maps compared to the 1900s. There were more categories of roads, Ministry of Transport road numbers were added, and new recreational features such as Youth Hostels and Golf Courses. Bartholomew’s topographic information was gathered partly from original Ordnance Survey maps, and partly from information sent in to Bartholomew from map users. One important user community for Bartholomew were cyclists. From the 1890s, Bartholomew entered into a formal relationship with the Cyclists’ Touring Club, then numbering around 60,500 cyclists, proposing that club members supplied Bartholomew with up-to-date information. In return, Bartholomew provided the CTC with discounted half-inch maps. The relationship worked very well, turning CTC members into an unofficial surveying army, feeding back reliable and accurate topographical information which Bartholomew would then use to update their maps. You can read more about this and see selected letters from cyclists at: http://digital.nls.uk/bartholomew/duncan-street-explorer/cyclists-touring-club.html.

Usually Bartholomew made revisions the sheets right up to the time of publication, so the date of publication is the best guide to the approximate date of the features shown on the map. You can view the dates of publication for the series at: https://maps.nls.uk/series/bart_half_great_britain.html

This dataset comprises 2 collections of maps. The facsmile collection contains all the marginalia information from the original map as well as the map itself, while the georectified collection contains just the map with an associated index for locating them. Each collection comprises approximately 101 000 monochrome images at 6-inch (1:10560) scale. Each image is supplied in .tiff format with appropriate ArcView and MapInfo world files, and shows the topography for all areas of England, Wales and Scotland as either quarter or, in some cases, full sheets. The images will cover the approximate epochs 1880's, 1900's, 1910's, 1920's and 1930's, but note that coverage is not countrywide for each epoch. The data was purchased by BGS from Sitescope, who obtained it from three sources - Royal Geographical Society, Trinity College Dublin and the Ordnance Survey. The data is for internal use by BGS staff on projects, and is available via a customised application created for the network GDI enabling users to search for and load the maps of their choice. The dataset will have many uses across all the geoscientific disciplines across which BGS operates, and should be viewed as a valuable addition to the BGS archive. There has been a considerable amount of work done during 2005, 2006 and 2007 to improve the accuracy of the OS Historic Map Collection. All maps should now be located to +- 50m or better. This is the best that can be achieved cost effectively. There are a number of reasons why the maps are inaccurate. Firstly, the original maps are paper and many are over 100 years old. They have not been stored in perfect condition. The paper has become distorted to varying degrees over time. The maps were therefore not accurate before scanning. Secondly, different generations of maps will have used different surveying methods and different spatial referencing systems. The same geographical object will not necessarily be in the same spatial location on subsequent editions. Thirdly, we are discussing maps, not plans. There will be cartographic generalisations which will affect the spatial representation and location of geographic objects. Finally, the georectification was not done in BGS but by the company from whom we purchased the maps. The company no longer exists. We do not know the methodology used for georectification.

The inventory identifies over 52,000 ancient woodland sites in England. Ancient woodland is identified using presence or absence of woods from old maps, information about the wood's name, shape, internal boundaries, location relative to other features, ground survey, and aerial photography. The information recorded about each wood and stored on the Inventory Database includes its grid reference, its area in hectares and how much is semi-natural or replanted. Prior to the digitisation of the boundaries, only paper maps depicting each ancient wood at 1:50 000 scale were available.

To begin with, Bartholomew printed their half-inch maps in Scotland as stand-alone sheets known as 'District Sheets' and by 1886 the whole of Scotland was covered. They then revised the maps into an ordered set of 29 sheets covering Scotland in a regular format. This was first pubilshed under the title Bartholomew’s Reduced Ordnance Survey of Scotland. The half-inch maps formed the principal content for Bartholomew's Survey Atlas of Scotland published in 1895. Bartholomew then moved south of the Border to the more lucrative but competitive market in England and Wales, whilst continuing to revise the Scottish sheets. The first complete coverage of Great Britain at the half-inch scale was achieved by 1903 with 67 individual half-inch sheets. Generally at this time, the English sheets sold three times more quickly, at three times the volume of the Scottish sheets. As for Scotland, Bartholomew used their half-inch sheets of England and Wales in the Survey Atlas of England and Wales published in 1903. From 1901, following a copyright complaint from Ordnance Survey, Bartholomew was forced to drop 'Ordnance' from their map titles. The series was initially renamed 'Bartholomew's Reduced Survey', and by 1903 'Bartholomew's half inch to the mile map'.Bartholomew revised the most popular half-inch sheets every couple of years, ensuring that their maps were more up to date than their main rival, Ordnance Survey. Popular sheets had print runs of several tens of thousands per edition, involving nearly 20 different layer colour plates for hillier areas with more colour.More information: http://geo.nls.uk/maps/bartholomew/great_britain/further_info.html

The Historic Flood Map is a GIS layer showing the maximum extent of individual Recorded Flood Outlines from river, the sea and groundwater springs that meet a set criteria. It shows areas of land that have previously been subject to flooding in England. This excludes flooding from surface water, except in areas where it is impossible to determine whether the source is fluvial or surface water but the dominant source is fluvial.

The majority of records began in 1946 when predecessor bodies to the Environment Agency started collecting detailed information about flooding incidents, although we hold limited details about flooding incidents prior to this date.

If an area is not covered by the Historic Flood Map it does not mean that the area has never flooded, only that we do not currently have records of flooding in this area that meet the criteria for inclusion. It is also possible that the pattern of flooding in this area has changed and that this area would now flood or not flood under different circumstances. Outlines that don’t meet this criteria are stored in the Recorded Flood Outlines dataset.

The Historic Flood Map takes into account the presence of defences, structures, and other infrastructure where they existed at the time of flooding. It will include flood extents that may have been affected by overtopping, breaches or blockages.

Flooding is shown to the land and does not necessarily indicate that properties were flooded internally.

This layer of the map based index (GeoIndex) shows the availability of 1:63360 scale geological maps. The maps are available for most of England and Wales and show early geological mapping covering the OS Old Series one inch map sheet areas.

Main Topics:

In the middle of 2001 Roger Kain and Richard Oliver, from the University of Exeter, published a substantial work entitled Historic Parishes of England and Wales: Electronic Map - Gazetteer- Metadata. This was the final product of a project aimed at locating and mapping the boundaries of parish and sub-parish units of the mid-nineteenth century. The authors published the results in a series of electronic maps supplied on CD-ROM. Each one of these 115 maps contain a scanned 1”:1 mile OS New Popular Series map, overlain by the boundaries. A reference number can be found in each of the polygons that can then be used to look up information about that parish in gazetteer in an accompanying book.

A major limitation of this work is that although the boundaries are in digital form, they are divided into 115 tiles, none of which have any spatial co-ordinate information inherent in them. This means that although the maps are invaluable as a reference tool, they can not be used together within a GIS to select, analyse and present historic information.

We have therefore created a single digital map of the boundaries to provide a single, continuous coverage of polygons, each of which contain the information provided by Kain and Oliver in their accompanying book. This information includes the parish name, Ancient County, and a reference number that coincides with entries for that parish in the 1851 census report.

It is recommended that users also order disc 1 of study 4348; Historic Parishes of England and Wales : an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata



Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

ArcGIS shapefile of 244 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the fifty-five ancient counties of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census for England and Wales.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

This dataset contains summary data regarding historical (1930s-40s) land use and land-use change between 1930s and 2007 according to broad land-use categories. Data provided are summary values at the 10-km grid square 'hectad' level of the British National Grid, specifying the proportion and proportion of change in broad land-use categories.

Historical data are based on the first Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain (Stamp 1931). For England and Wales, digitisation of the historical maps contains information supplied by Natural England, based on methods developed by Baily et al. (2011). For Scotland, map images were digitised using the R package HistMapR (Auffret et al. 2017). Both methods involve processing and classifying images based on the colour of the historical land-use map categories. Classified maps were then resampled to the 25m resolution of the modern UK Land Cover Map 2007 (Morton et al. 2011), and both historical and modern land-use categories were adjusted to produce broad categories of equivalent land use: Arable, Grassland, Urban, Woodland, Agriculturally-Improved Grassland and Surface Water. In Scotland, surface water from a modern map is used for the historical time period due to issues in classifying this category. Pixels within a 75m buffer of the modern road network were removed due to the disproportionate size of roads shown in the historical maps, and pixels falling into some coastal land-use categories in the modern maps were removed due to a lack of equivalent in the historical maps. The proportions of remaining pixels within each hectad, and the change in the proportion over time was then calculated. Full details of data creation and processing can be found in Suggitt et al. (2023), and more information on the data files can be found in the readme.

The extent of the data files: GB_LandUseChange_Data.csv - table containing summary data, 2802 rows and 15 columns GB_LandUseChange_LowlandGrasslandChange.csv - table containing data on lowland grassland change, 2802 rows and 10 columns

The file GB_LandUseChange_Raster.tif is a GeoTIFF file primarily intended to be used with the R script. It can also be opened using other GIS software.

If R is installed with required packages (see sessionInfo.txt), the file Rplots.pdf can be generated running: Rscript GB_LandUseChange_Code.R

References:

Auffret, A.G., Kimberley, A., Plue, J., Skånes, H., Jakobsson, S., Waldén, E., Wennbom, M., Wood, H., Bullock, J.M., Cousins, S.A.O., Gartz, M., Hooftman, D.A.P., Tränk, L., 2017, HistMapR: Rapid digitization of historical land-use maps in R, Methods in Ecology and Evolution 8: 1453-1457. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12788

Baily, B., Riley, M., Aucott, P. & Southall, H., 2011, Extracting digital data from the First Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain – Methods, issues and potential, Applied Geography 31: 959-968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2010.12.007

Morton, D., Rowland, C., Wood, C., Meek, L., Marston, C., Smith, G., Wadsworth, R., Simpson, I.C., 2011, Final Report for LCM2007 – the new UK Land Cover Map, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, UK. http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/14854

Stamp, D.L., 1931, The Land Utilisation Survey of Britain. Geographical Journal 78: 40-47. https://doi.org/10.2307/1784994

Suggitt, A.J., Wheatley, C.J., Aucott, P., Beale, C.M., Fox, R., Hill, J.K., Isaac, N.J.B., Martay, B., Southall, H., Thomas, C.D., Walker, K.J., Auffret, A.G., 2023, Linking climate warming and land conversion to species’ range changes across Great Britain, Nature Communications, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42475-0

The 1:63 360 / 1:50 000 scale map series are the most useful scale for most purposes. They provide almost complete coverage of onshore Great Britain. The BGS collection of 1:63 360 and 1:50 000 scale maps comprises two map series: - Geological Survey of England and Wales 1:63 360 / 1:50 000 Geological Map Series [New Series]. These maps are based on the Ordnance Survey One-inch New Series topographic basemaps and provide almost complete coverage of England and Wales, with the exception of sheet 180 (Knighton). The quarter-sheets of 1:63 360 Old Series sheets 91 to 110 coincide with sheets 1 to 73 of the New Series maps. These earlier maps often carry two sheet numbers which refer to the Old Series and the New Series. - Geological Survey of Scotland 1:63 360 / 1:50 000 Geological Map Series. These maps are based on the Ordnance Survey First, Second, Third and Fourth editions of the One-inch map of Scotland. The maps used the most recent topographic basemap available at the time. In the Western Isles, one-inch mapping was abandoned and replaced by maps at 1:100 000 scale, which are associated with this series. Sheets were traditionally issued at 1:63 360 scale, with the first 1:50 000 maps appearing in 1972. Sheets at 1:50 000 scale may be either facsimile enlargements of an existing 1:63 360 sheets, or may contain new geology and cartography. The latter bear the additional series designation '1:50 000 series'. Within the Scottish series, new mapping at 1:50 000 scale was split into east and west sheets. For example, the original one-inch sheet 32 became 1:50 000 sheets 32E and 32W. A number of irregular sheets were also introduced with the new 1:50 000 scale mapping. There are a number of irregular special sheets within both series. Geological maps represent a geologist's compiled interpretation of the geology of an area. A geologist will consider the data available at the time, including measurements and observations collected during field campaigns, as well as their knowledge of geological processes and the geological context to create a model of the geology of an area. This model is then fitted to a topographic basemap and drawn up at the appropriate scale, with generalization if necessary, to create a geological map, which is a representation of the geological model. Explanatory notes and vertical and horizontal cross sections may be published with the map. Geological maps may be created to show various aspects of the geology, or themes. The most common map themes held by BGS are solid (later referred to as bedrock) and drift (later referred to as superficial). These maps are, for the most part, hard-copy paper records stored in the National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) and are delivered as digital scans through the BGS website.

These geolocated datasets derive from annotations of Christopher Saxton's County Maps of England & Wales, annotations of published volumes of John Leland's Itineraries in Wales, and annotations of Wenceslaus Hollar's vignettes intended for publication in Britannia.

Please see the GitHub repository for details of the sources used and visualisation of their geographic scope.

The Historic Environment Opportunity Map for New Woodland dataset identifies areas in England that may be suitable for new woodland, based solely on available Historic Environment data. The dataset categorises land by different opportunity ratings to reflect the potential suitability of land for woodland creation while acknowledging areas of uncertainty due to data availability.The purpose of this dataset is to guide landowners, planners, and decision-makers in considering woodland creation from a historic environment perspective. It should be noted that this dataset only considers the Historic Environment and therefore the opportunity ratings do not guarantee or preclude approval for woodland creation proposals.As any forestry proposal could have the potential to affect the Historic Environment you should contact your local historic environment service. The local historic environment service can provide further data to support woodland creation proposals.NHLE is the official, up to date register of all nationally protected historic buildings and sites in England.SHINE is a single, nationally consistent dataset of non-designated historic and archaeological features from across England that could benefit from land management schemes.The opportunity ratings are as defined:· Favourable - Areas deemed suitable for new woodland on consideration of available Historic Environment data.· Neutral - Areas deemed neither favourable nor unfavourable for new woodland on consideration of available Historic Environment data. Proposals in these areas will require additional consideration of the Historic Environment on a case-by-case basis.· Unclassified - Areas, where SHINE data has been supplied, with no assigned opportunity rating. This illustrates a current absence of recorded data from a Historic Environment perspective. However, as SHINE data is included in the dataset for this area, a degree of confidence may be inferred when considering the absence of historic environment features.· Unclassified (No SHINE supplied) - Areas, where SHINE data has not been supplied, with no assigned opportunity rating. This illustrates a current absence of recorded data from a Historic Environment perspective.· Unsuitable - Areas deemed unsuitable for new woodland on consideration of available Historic Environment data.Unclassified areas may be suitable or unsuitable for new woodland. To better understand these areas, contact the local historic environment service in accordance with the UKFS and Historic Environment Guidance for Forestry in England - GOV.UKThe datasets included in each opportunity rating are as follows:Favourable· Lost Historic Woodlands (ArchAI/Forestry Commission) – An A.I. dataset that identifies areas of woodland depicted on early 20th Century Ordnance Survey mapping which have since been lost.Neutral· Historic Parklands (Zulu Ecosystems) – an A.I. dataset that identifies areas of parkland depicted on early 20th Century Ordnance Survey mapping.· World Heritage Site Core data (Historic England) – Core areas of World Heritage Sites, as designated by UNESCO.· World Heritage Site Buffer (Historic England) – Buffer zones surrounding World Heritage Sites, as designated by UNESCO.· Ridge and Furrow (Low) (ArchAI) – an A.I. dataset that identifies areas of less well-preserved historic ridge and furrow derived from LiDAR data.Unclassified· HER Boundaries (SHINE supplied) – Geographic areas covered by local historic environment services, where SHINE data has been supplied to the Forestry Commission.· HER Boundaries (No SHINE supplied) - Geographic areas covered by local historic environment services where SHINE data has not been supplied to the Forestry Commission.Unsuitable· Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) (local historic environment services) – regional datasets that provide information on the historic character of the landscape.· Scheduled Monuments (Historic England) – Protected archaeological sites of national importance.· Scheduled Monuments Buffer – A 20 metre buffer surrounding Scheduled Monuments in-line with UKFS.· Selected Heritage Inventory for Natural England (SHINE)(local historic environment services) – National dataset of non-designated heritage assets.· Registered Parks and Gardens (Historic England) – Parks and Gardens designated as being of national significance.· Registered Battlefields (Historic England) – Battlefields designated as being of national significance.· Ridge and Furrow (High) (ArchAI) – an A.I. dataset that identifies areas of well-preserved historic ridge and furrow derived from LiDAR data.

The system of Ancient Parishes was not defined by central government, but grew up over the centuries starting in Saxon times. By origin it was an entirely ecclesiastical system, but it became the main geography for a variety of statistical reporting, partly because the main local sources for many government inquiries were the parish priests of the Church of England. Its origins mean there was no central record of the system, and boundary mapping of the whole country by the Ordnance Survey was not completed until the late 19th century, so there is room for substantial debate about what parishes actually existed at a given date. This file was constructed around the county-by-county parish listings of the 1831 Census of Population. Under the Ancient Parish system, many parishes especially in the north of England consisted of a mother parish based on the main settlement, plus surrounding Townships, Chapelries and hamlets (many of which later became separate Civil Parishes): the file makes no attempt to represent those subdivisions, only the overall parishes. Statistical data and other information used in “A Vision of Britain through Time” can be accessed and downloaded here: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data.

PLEASE NOTE: This data product is not available in Shapefile format or KML at https://naturalengland-defra.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/Defra::living-england-habitat-map-phase-4/about, as the data exceeds the limits of these formats. Please select an alternative download format.This data product is also available for download in multiple formats via the Defra Data Services Platform at https://environment.data.gov.uk/explore/4aa716ce-f6af-454c-8ba2-833ebc1bde96?download=true.The Living England project, led by Natural England, is a multi-year programme delivering a satellite-derived national habitat layer in support of the Environmental Land Management (ELM) System and the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) Pilot. The project uses a machine learning approach to image classification, developed under the Defra Living Maps project (SD1705 – Kilcoyne et al., 2017). The method first clusters homogeneous areas of habitat into segments, then assigns each segment to a defined list of habitat classes using Random Forest (a machine learning algorithm). The habitat probability map displays modelled likely broad habitat classifications, trained on field surveys and earth observation data from 2021 as well as historic data layers. This map is an output from Phase IV of the Living England project, with future work in Phase V (2022-23) intending to standardise the methodology and Phase VI (2023-24) to implement the agreed standardised methods.The Living England habitat probability map will provide high-accuracy, spatially consistent data for a range of Defra policy delivery needs (e.g. 25YEP indicators and Environment Bill target reporting Natural capital accounting, Nature Strategy, ELM) as well as external users. As a probability map, it allows the extrapolation of data to areas that we do not have data. These data will also support better local and national decision making, policy development and evaluation, especially in areas where other forms of evidence are unavailable. Process Description: A number of data layers are used to inform the model to provide a habitat probability map of England. The main sources layers are Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 satellite data from the ESA Copericus programme. Additional datasets were incorporated into the model (as detailed below) to aid the segmentation and classification of specific habitat classes. Datasets used:Agri-Environment Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) Monitoring, British Geological Survey Bedrock Mapping 1:50k, Coastal Dune Geomatics Mapping Ground Truthing, Crop Map of England (RPA), Dark Peak Bog State Survey, Desktop Validation and Manual Points, EA Integrated Height Model 10m, EA Saltmarsh Zonation and Extent, Field Unit NEFU, Living England Collector App NEFU/EES, Long Term Monitoring Network (LTMN), Lowland Heathland Survey, National Forest Inventory (NFI), National Grassland Survey, National Plant Monitoring Scheme, NEFU Surveys, Northumberland Border Mires, OS Vector Map District , Priority Habitats Inventory (PHI) B Button, European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 , Space2 Eye Lens: Ainsdale NNR, Space2 Eye Lens: State of the Bog Bowland Survey, Space2 Eye Lens: State of the Bog Dark Peak Condition Survey, Space2 Eye Lens: State of the Bog (MMU) Mountain Hare Habitat Survey Dark Peak, Uplands Inventory, West Pennines Designation NVC Survey, Wetland Inventories, WorldClim - Global Climate DataFull metadata can be viewed on data.gov.uk.

This geolocated dataset derives from several surveys commissioned by the English Crown in 1565, enquiring into the state of the various ports, landing places, and coastal communities of England and Wales.

Please see the GitHub repository for details of the sources used and visualisation of their geographic scope.

INDEX VILLARIS: or, An Alphabetical Table of all the cities, market-towns, parishes, villages, and private seats in England and Wales was first published by John Adams in 1680. This dataset consists of a transcription of all 24,000 place-names listed in Index Villaris, together with the the symbols representing Adams's categorisation of each place and modern versions of the place-names and the counties and administrative hundred in which they lie or lay. It also comprises a transcription of the latitude and longitude recorded by Adams, and another set of coordinates generated by the application of a thin plate spline transformation calculated by matching some 2,000 place-names to the accurately-georeferenced CAMPOP Towns dataset.

The dataset is being checked, corrected, and refined to include linkage to other geospatial references such as OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, and will in due course be made available in the Linked Places Format.

The Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 prompted the government in London to undertake a survey the following year to establish the number of guest beds and quantity of stabling available across England and Wales for billeting soldiers. This dataset represents an attempt to identify and geolocate all of the place-names noted in that survey.

Transcription was undertaken for CAMPOP by Jacob Field, with funding provided by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Dan Bogart. Stephen Gadd is responsible for place-name identification and geolocation, matching place-names as far as possible to the Index Villaris, 1680 dataset, GB1900 labels, and OpenStreetMap nodes.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS PRE-RELEASE DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY DATA

This layer of the map based index (GeoIndex) shows the location of earthquakes within the UK. The historical catalogue has been compiled, in general, from macroseismic observations (ie felt effects). Before 1700, only earthquakes with magnitudes of 4.0 ML or greater are included. After 1700, all known events with magnitudes of 3.0 ML or greater are included together with some other, smaller ones. Accuracies of magnitude, location, and origin time vary with the quality of information available for this period as they do for instrumental measurements in the post 1970 period. In that case, variations are largely a function of the seismograph station coverage, which has been improving up to the present day.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

These digital boundaries were created by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project and form part of the Great Britain Historical Database, which contains a wide range of geographically-located statistics, selected to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain, generally at sub-county scales.

They represent the boundaries of Registration Counties in England and Wales as in use at the date of each Census of Population between 1851 and 1911, 1911 being the last census to report extensively on these units.

These digital boundaries can be used to map economic, social and demograohic statistics from the Censuses of Population, 1851 to 1911, the Registrar-General's reports from the same period, and other relevant statistical sources. They can also be used as reference maps for these administrative units, which often differ substantially from both Ancient Counties and 20th century Administrative Counties.

The boundary data contain the same numerical identifiers as are included in the GBHDB transcriptions of census and vital registration statistics for Registration Counties, making statistical mapping very straightforward.