By Tricia Moxey, Trustee
Many of the walks on our website provide opportunities to pause and enjoy a panoramic view from a vantage point. The layout of roads, settlements, woods and fields is a visual record of many centuries of human activity.
Checking with an Ordnance Survey map, it is possible to pinpoint significant landmarks and features such as hedged field boundaries. From the 16th century, assorted records of land ownership have survived, but the most complete set of records was gathered by surveyors for the mid-19th century Tithe Awards, a forerunner of today’s rating assessments for council tax and business rates.
Prepared between 1837 and the 1850’s, these documents were the result of painstaking work by surveyors whose task was to map and list the details of land ownership, occupiers, size of plot and land use. Buildings, gardens and names of fields were recorded. Subsequent research by local historians has revealed that some field names can be traced back centuries, an indication of the close association of communities with the land that provided their food and opportunities for employment.
Comparing these old parish maps with recent maps highlights the significant loss of hedgerows with the creation of much larger fields to allow agricultural machines to work the land.
For further information please see
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/tithes
www.hundredparishes.org.uk has more than a hundred walk routes that can be freely downloaded.
