Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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At present, maps in the Devon in 1840 series are not available in bookshops unless you ask the shop to order the item for you. You may also buy the maps using other websites like Amazon, but delivery charges may be higher.

On the Shop page there is a map that shows the outlines of all the available sheets. From there, you can access a page of information about each sheet, which includes details of the area that the sheet covers (in the Area Covered tab). No maps in this series are available except the ones listed on this website.

The available maps cover northern Devon. I am working on expanding the coverage in a south-easterly direction, to take in areas around Tiverton, Crediton and Hatherleigh. Because of the large amount of work that goes into creating each sheet, it is too soon to estimate a publication date.

That would be a rash promise, given that about fifty sheets would be needed to cover Devon completely! I hope to be able to cover all of northern and eastern Devon, including Exeter, which would take the number of completed sheets to about thirty, but I don’t want to think beyond that at present.

I am only working on maps for Devon. In any case, for some counties, it would be difficult to do because their coverage by tithe maps is more patchy than Devon’s.

The mapping extends only to the county boundary. Parts of other counties that fall inside the map’s edges are left as white space. (However, exceptions may be made for territory that has changed county since 1840, such as Chardstock, Dalwood, Hawkchurch and Stockland parishes which were then in Dorset; that issue has not come up for the sheets published so far.) To be honest, this is just a time-saving measure, because of the significant amount of extra work that would be involved in mapping fragments of other counties. That is especially so because working on places outside Devon often involves using different archives, different reference books, and so on.

They are based mainly on tithe maps, but also on other historical maps where tithe map coverage is deficient, particularly for the built-up parts of some towns. I have also used other sources for some specific kinds of information (such as archaeological features). For more about this, see the Short Guide to Historical Sources on this website, and the more detailed Guide to Historical Sources that is printed on every sheet.

The great bulk of information in the tithe maps is reproduced, but not all. The main omission is the field-numbers. On a tithe map, every field (and wood, farmstead, etc) is marked with a reference number, unique within that parish, which refers to an entry in the tithe apportionment. If you want to look up information in the tithe apportionment (such as to find out owners’ and occupiers’ names), you may have to consult the tithe map to find out the numbers. However, my maps do show plenty of place-names, and often you can use place-names instead of field-numbers to look up information in the apportionment.

Another difference is scale. Tithe maps are typically 13 or 27 inches to one mile, whereas my regular maps are four inches to one mile. That reduction in scale involves some generalization, mainly affecting the sizes and shapes of buildings. On the other hand, my maps of towns and villages do reproduce all the detail of the original maps, because they are much closer to the originals in scale.

Bear in mind that the tithe maps themselves (and digital images of them) are not easy to use. Most tithe maps are plain and technical in appearance, with few place-names, the manuscript may have faded or cracked with age, and each tithe map only covers one parish. My maps give a more rounded picture of the historical landscape because they show toll-gates, boundaries, streams, ancient earthworks, and so on, which tithe maps usually omit. For researchers, maps in the Devon in 1840 series are complementary to tithe maps; they both have their uses.

Apart from field-names, the great majority of place-names in the tithe apportionments are reproduced on the maps, except that names of some smallholdings (those which consisted of a few fields and no house) may be omitted. Field-names are shown on the maps in a more selective way; this is explained on the Field-Names in Devon page. Note that each sheet includes a useful index that lists all the place-names on the main map except field-names.

Those place-names were not copied from tithe maps and apportionments, but have been obtained from various other maps, documents and printed sources of different kinds. I have followed a strict rule that no place-name is shown on the maps unless I have a source for it dated before 1850. Sadly, there are some minor place-names that the maps do not show because I have not found a source for them earlier than the late-nineteenth century. This tends to be true of isolated cottages in the countryside, and some natural features like streams.

Field-name abbreviations (such as ‘C’ for ‘Close’) are explained in the map’s legend, and also on the Field-Names in Devon page.

Broadly speaking, they are as accurate as the old maps on which they are based, which vary from ‘nearly as accurate as modern Ordnance Survey maps’ at one extreme to ‘grossly inaccurate’ at the other. Actually, it is unusual for a tithe map to be grossly inaccurate (Northam parish is one example). Normally, inaccuracy in tithe maps is not obvious to the eye, but is revealed when taking measurements from the map, or digitally overlaying one map onto another.

I would not rely on these maps for precise measurements of position, distance or area, but that would be an unusual thing to do with an old map. There are ways to approach that kind of problem when it arises, such as when an archaeologist tries to locate the position on the ground of a feature that is shown on the map but has been destroyed.

This is probably because the feature was not shown on the tithe map (or other old map) from which the information has been obtained. The likelihood of the feature being shown on the original map depends on what kind of feature it is. For a tithe map, omitting a house or a field boundary would have been considered a serious error, but minor features like paths, footbridges, wells and small ponds were not relevant to the map’s purpose and they were left out, or were shown inconsistently. The Guide to Historical Sources printed on each sheet gives some guidance about the mapping of different kinds of feature.

There are certain kinds of landscape feature for which I have used other sources of information. They are features that definitely existed in 1840, although they may not have been recorded until a later date. In particular, this is the case for antiquities (barrows, castle earthworks, medieval crosses, and so on) which were not usually shown on tithe maps. The Guide to Historical Sources goes into some detail about the approach taken to the mapping of antiquities and the sources used for them.

It might be caused by sloppiness in the cartography, but I hope not! If the two maps are at very different scales then the difference might be caused by generalization in the smaller-scale map (see the question ‘Do your maps reproduce all the information that’s in the tithe maps?’ above).

Otherwise, differences sometimes occur when the tithe map you are using is the one known as the diocesan copy, which is the one kept in the Devon Heritage Centre. There were actually three original tithe maps made for each parish, and the Devon in 1840 series is based on the one in The National Archives. The three originals were not always identical. I have assumed that the tithe map in The National Archives is more likely to be correct than the diocesan copy.

Of course, the first approach is to search the web. One website worth mentioning in particular is GENUKI, which is mainly for genealogy but also has a lot about places. Navigate from its Devon page to its pages about particular towns and parishes. Its information is mostly in the form of references to other sources of information, either printed or on the web.

It is helpful to visit a reference library and browse the shelves. The central public libraries in Barnstaple, Plymouth and Torquay each have a room devoted to their local studies collections, but the largest such library in Devon is the Westcountry Studies Library which is housed at the Devon Heritage Centre in the outskirts of Exeter. If you are starting from scratch then you should seek out books that have been published about your particular locality, which those reference libraries are very likely to have. To obtain your own copy of a book no longer in print, search for a second-hand copy on websites such as AbeBooks.co.uk.

To cut a long story short, it involves making a digital tracing of each tithe map, then stretching and squeezing the tracings a little to improve their accuracy, and then joining them together along their edges. Place-names and land-use are copied from the tithe apportionments onto paper ‘working copies’ of the tithe maps before being transferred into the digital maps. Finally, information is added that comes from other sources, such as antiquities and contours. The software used is a mixture of commercial applications and software created specially for this project.

No, the maps are available printed on paper only. For a number of reasons (including copyright protection), there are no plans for them to be available for viewing online or for downloading.

Yes, there are limited stocks of unfolded maps. They are otherwise identical to the standard (folded) maps. The basic price is the same but there will be an additional charge for delivery, with the map rolled in a tube. Contact me to enquire about availability and pricing.

The sheets are numbered in a geographical order over the whole county of Devon. That doesn’t correspond to the order of publication, so some numbers may be missing from the sequence of currently available sheets. The numbers are shown on the map on the Shop page.

Probably not. Old maps (including early Ordnance Survey maps) were rarely concerned with rights of way as such. If a road or path is shown on a map then that tells you it existed at the date of survey, but not whether there was any public usage. See the Ramblers website for advice about rights of way.