Hi!

On the Half Inch series, would anyone like to suggest an explanation why Bartholomew's cartographer was so inconsistent with annotation of contour heights, particularly intermediate contours on a layer?

From the Half-Inch maps I've collected, the Merseyside sheet no 28 is as far south as I've seen contour labelling go, but even on some of the Scottish sheets, annotation of contours is very erratic - in fact there's one sheet - Firth Of Forth I think - that has only one solitary label I can see on it - a "1500" label in one odd place and that's in a barbaric seriffed style almost identical to what Johnston & Bacon used on their 3 mile atlases!

All the other contour height labels I can see are in the hand-lettered small sloping figures usually seen on Bartholomew's cartography!

NB! I'm referring to actual contour-line labelling here, not the spot heights!

Chris Williams

PS! Since having my eye done it's been extremely difficult to study close details on mapping, so if anybody spots any other solitary labelled contours in odd places on sheets further south than no 28, could they post an example or two?

I'm very curious to know if Bartholomew have perpetraied the solitary contour-line label elsewhere on other sheets, particularly lowland ones!

Hi!

Further to the above I've got Norfolk Sheet 26 which I think is unique in the series as being the only one whose colour-layering is entirely shades of green! (I think the highest point in Norfolk is only 351 feet!)

I found a mysterious '100' on its own next to a contour-line near Tadenham somewhere - is that a contour-line label or a spot-height?

Chris Williams

The highest point in Norfolk is Beacon Hill @ TG186413, between Sheringham and Cromer. It's 102m / 336 feet above sea level. It's the only (traditional) county highest point (top) in England or Wales I haven't visited.

Hi!



I stand corrected on that one - I thought it was higher than that!

Chris Williams

Hi!

Furthermore to the above I was looking at the NLS 1917-1924 Half Inch digitised maps, and I noticed on the North Lancashire sheet there were (apparently!) a lot more of the contour-lines annotated with their height than appears to be the case on the more modern ones (sheet 31), as well as the shades of green being different! (The NLS maps use shades of emerald green whilst the later ones use shades of apple green)

Did Bartholomew's cartographer use the same basic land-height/contour data and simply revised the roads, railways, settlements etc., on later dated maps, or were the printing plates completely redone?

Chris Williams

PS! I was looking thro' my 3 mile J & B atlas today and noticed almost identical lettering and figures for place-names and spot-heights/contour lines respectively - is it likely both J & B and Bartholomew had the same chappies lettering the original maps they drew?

Chris, are you sponsored every time you use an exclamation mark?

The Barts half inch maps now on SABRE Maps were reduced from earlier OS one inch Third Series (this is the same base as the MOT Maps so in theory the two maps should line up exactly - if properly georeferenced to the nearest pixel). The OS caught up with Barts when the Popular Edition came out, being the first OS map in full colour using newer print technology, so this probably inspired Barts to revise their own contour mapping.


I suppose this is a good a place as any to say this. Chris, I have enjoyed reading your recent set of posts, and it's nice to see other people become interested in this sort of era of mapping, but your continual use of exclamation marks, and starting every post with "Hi!" is putting you up for regular ridicule and mockery from other members. I'm not saying that's a particularly good thing, it's just the way it is, so you might want to think about not doing it in the future, and just concentrate on the map stuff instead.

I've browsed many, many, forums over the years and never read anywhere that it's discourteous to begin posts with a greeting - many people use all sorts of things!

With regard to the use of exclamation marks, no I'm not sponsored, etc., it's just the way I phrase questions and/or comments tends to make an exclamation-mark more appropriate.

With all due respect to everyone else, this is a forum concerned with roads, transport, driving and mapping, not on the niceties of English Grammar and Punctuation, and as I see it, I post only on the subjects this Forum is concerned with, and never, never comment about other members (except to quote something they say which I have a direct answer for) - (except in 'Unleashed' of course) and that should be enough.

Chris Williams

There are certain conventions in online communication, eg. ALL CAPITALS is considered to be shouting. By ending every sentence with an exclamation mark, and substituting exclamation marks for full stops in abbreviations, the impression is given that the comment is from a highly excitable person.

It is perfectly OK to use the occasional exclamation mark, eg. to express excitement, anger or exasperation. Like swearing, the impact is heightened if it's used sparingly and appropriately. Use it habitually and there's no impact: it becomes background noise.

Unlike a personal e-mail, a forum post doesn't usually need a greeting or a sign off. It's part of an ongoing conversation. Imagine if you said "Hi!" before every response you made in a spoken conversation.

Your "handle" is always shown in the panel to the left of your post and you can use the board's control panel to add an automatic signature if you like.

Can we draw a line under this (if you'll excuse the pun) and get back to talking about contours?

I aspire at some point to get back up to the NLS and have a look at some 1930s scans to see some the variations described upthread, and hopefully I'll be in a position to put them online soon too.

Are we talking about actual contour lines or the height shadings?

The contour lines appear to be at 100 ft intervals. There appear to be two different heights shown on the maps: spot heights and peak heights, with peak heights sometimes being well outside the limits of the contour band that they appear in.

The shadings don't appear to uniformly change at certain contour boundaries, with wider ranges of heights getting the same colour at lower elevations.

It was other members that wished to try and instruct me in the niceties of grammar and punctuation on forums, with no wish on my part to get drawn into it.



From what I can see, the contour-interval on Bartholomew's maps is variable, and has two differing sequences depending on wether you are looking at an England & Wales or a Scottish sheet.

For most E & W sheets (except 28 & 31) the interval appears to be 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1250, 1250, 1500, 1750, 2000, 2250, 2500, 2750, 3000, 3250 and 3500. However sheets 28 (Merseyside) and 31 (N Lancashire) have an additional 25' contour, which doesn't seem to appear on any other lowland sheets. (I'd have thought the Lincolnshire/Fenland sheets would show it)

E & W are mainly grass-green for 0-100', then two lighter shades for 100-200', then 200-400', followed by pale orange for 400-600' then gradually darker shades of brown to 2000', then grey for 2000-3250' and white for everything higher than 3250'.

Scotland is another sequence altogether - it apprars to be 100, 250, 500, 750 than every 250' to 4250' however the legend differs from the E & W sheets - it's marked 0-100' (grass-green), 100-250' (light green), 250-500' (very light green), then every 250' up to 2000' in progressively darker shades of brown, then 2000-3250' in shades of grey and finally 3250-4250' which is white. (I'd have thought 4000' and above ought to be shades of light purple really) The Scottish sheets, from what I can see, have no 50' contour line.

My original question doesn't refer to the spot or peak heights, but the actual labels along the contour-lines themselves indicating which height they are, and this is where Bartholomew appears to be so inconsistent!

I had to guess the 100ft interval, precisely because there were no labels at all along the contour lines in the samples I viewed.

On Fenland Sheet 25, near the village of Halstead in Rutland, there's '700' annotated but its difficult to tell wether its a spot-height or contour-line label - it could equally be either, and the same has been done in another place with '100' on Norfolk sheet 26.

Sheet 22 Mid Wales has one strange little unlabelled hill with '200', '300', '400' and '500' marked on it's contour-lines but the sheet seems totally devoid of any labels elsewhere!

Incidentally, I ordered by mistake a Half Inch cloth map of Sheet 21 (Suffolk) in the old-style cover with the King's Crest on the legend (1960 version) - one thing I noticed about it was the emerald-green areas denoting land below sea-level weren't marked - was this only a feature of later maps? I eventually found a "Globe" 1971 edition of the Suffolk sheet, and this does have below-sea-level land marked on it.

Chris Williams

I've recently been able to read the complete 1950s set of 62 "New Revised Edition" in Birmingham Library, which reveals another interesting point - if you study Sheet 42 Northumberland, the eastern lowlands east of the A1 have got the 50' contour line labelled in quite a few places, but north of Bamburgh Bay and getting towards Tweeddale there appears to be no 50' contour at all on the 0-100' layer, labelled or unlabelled, and the same seems to be the case north of Morecambe Bay on the N Lancashire Sheet 31!

Does anyone else who has sheets 31/42 and good close-up vision agree with me?

Chris Williams

PS! I've just discovered a layer-tint howler on sheet 31 last night - SW of Blackburn near Cherry Tree/Pleasington there's a countour line labelled '400' (this is an isolated area about 3-4 square miles, roughly egg-shaped with no indication of how much above 400 feet it rises), but it's been tinted pale green diagonal lines as per the 200-400' layer instead of orange diagonal lines for 400-600'!

(If you look at these maps with a magnifier you'll see 0-100', is an apple green solid tint, 100-200' is apple green cross-hatching, then 200-400' is apple green diagonal lines only, giwing an effect of progressively lighter shades of green to the eye, then 400-600' is orange diagonals, 600-800' is orange cross-hatching, than 800-1000' is solid orange. The sequence then repeats with brown for 1000' and above and so on).

Further to the above, on Northumberland sheet 42 near the eastern coast east of the A1 a (labelled!) 50' contour-line can be traced upwards in the green 0-100' layer as far north as near Dunstanburgh where it simply disappears! If you look closely there's a figure "50" nearby just before it fades out - there doesn't appear to be any 50' contours whatsoever north of this point - can anyone suggest an explanation for this?

NB! I'm not referring to a continuation onto Sheet 41 Tweeddale by the way! - this is all on the same map-sheet!

Chris Williams

I've now collected 57 of the Half Inch Map Series and am just waiting to complete them with Sheets 14 (Oxford) and Sheet 15 (Herts & Bucks) which I can't locate yet, but when I've got them all I can draw up a table that will answer the question of Half-Inch Map Contours definitely!

Turning now to the Red/Brown National Map Series to 1:100000 scale which has heights in metres, am I correct in saying these were produced by computer and have no contour-line height labelling on any of the maps whatsoever?

Chris Williams

I would normally be able to tell you as I have a sizeable collection of them and one day aim to have the full set of 62, but they're not with me at the moment! From what I recall though I don't think they have contour lines on them, just the shading.

This brings me to another example!

In a Buxton Bookshop I saw a Bartholomew colour-relief map of the Channel Islands in similar style to the mainland ones, but what struck me about it was that Bartholomew's cartographer had used a different colour for each 50' band, starting at grass green for 0-50', green hatching for 50-100', green lines for 100-150' and so on until 400-450', which was a dark brown normally used for 1750-2000!

In my opinion the use of so many colour bands over only 450 feet height range gives a wildly exaggerated picture of the landform as well as making the map difficult to read!

Bartholomew should have used the same colour-layer scheme as (for example) Sheet 21 (Suffolk) which has a maximum of 458' near Chedburgh, a, marked in orange diagonals, and this would have given a much truer picture of the Channel Islands land-form!

Chris Williams

PS! I'm fairly sure the Channel Isles map hasn't any contour-line height labels on it either!