Wednesday 28 March 2012

Lost tollhouses

Along with the picture of the New Alresford tollhouse, Hampshire county archives also have photographs of several other tollhouses. I think I have pinpointed the locations of the three in the Fareham area.



View Lost tollhouses in a larger map

To track them down I used the locations from the archive along with the maps available at www.old-maps.co.uk and Google's own maps to find the present day location corresponding to the point on the old map I think the buildings were.

Monday 26 March 2012

New Alresford tollhouse

I have added a page for the New Alresford tollhouse to the site here.

Although I have not yet taken any pictures of this tollhouse I have managed to find an old photo of it in the Hampshire County Council archives and also added a link to the English Heritage site giving the details of its listed status.

HCC have 7 other photos of tollhouses (returned by an archive search on "tollhouse") but none of these seem to be still standing.

Old maps of Hampshire

I have found an excellent site containing high quality scans of many old maps of Hampshire: Old Hampshire Mapped.

It interesting to see tollhouses and toll-gates marked on some of the maps and not others of a similar period. Also interesting to see how the names of places have changed over the years. Big towns seem to have remained constant over long periods of time; but the farms and the urban areas named after former farms have very variable spelling. In some cases the older spelling seems more sensible and less fanciful than the modern spelling.

I am having a break from mapping Devon's tollhouse locations and am browsing the Hampshire archives to see what tollhouse related records and images they have. Will provide links to them if I find anything interesting.

Website update

I have just updated my website with a new page for one of the tollhouses in Twyford, Hampshire.

The page has a few photos I took today, a map of the building's location and a link to the English Heritage page giving the listed building details.

The Devon map is still in production, might be done by the end of the week if I get a couple of good hours spent on it.

Thursday 22 March 2012

Tollhouse national ID

I have started using the Tollhouse National ID codes on the pages on my website. Using this will help link entries on my site to the information at various other places, including the Turnpike Road website and Tollhouse Alan's Flickr pages.

I am still working on the Devon map. There are a lot of tollhouses in this county so it is taking a while. Tollhouse Alan has kindly provided me with an up to date copy of his spreadsheet and a pointer to some Google Earth information that should speed things up.

I have also been in contact with the Hampshire County Council archives people who are happy for me to link to tollhouse related items they hold, so expect those to start appearing on my site soon. I assume other counties have similar archives and will be contacting them once I have run out of local stuff to link to.

Keith

Friday 16 March 2012

Summary of progress

I have been at this mapping thing for a few weeks now and I thought I would show my overall progress on a map of the UK.
Green counties have had an initial map produced for them. Devon is orange as that is the one I am currently working on.

It's going to take a while to map the entire country!

Sources that I have been using include Tollhouse Alan's Flickr pages, his turnpike pages, the OS website and general searches in Google.

Isle of Wight mapped

For some reason I missed the Isle of Wight when I mapped Hampshire. Not a bad collection, I have locations for 6 tollhouses on the island. With luck I will be there later in the spring and will be able to take photos for the site.


View Isle of Wight tollhouses in a larger map

Monday 12 March 2012

Dorset mapped

I have completed my map of tollhouses in Dorset, which can be seen below. Of course these locations are also added to the UK tollhouse map, which can be accessed using the tabs at the top of the blog.

I think I will continue heading west, so it is Devon next.


View Dorset tollhouses in a larger map

Dorset map in progress

I am about 75% done with the tollhouse map of Dorset. Will have it posted here in the next day or two.

Monday 5 March 2012

Website gets new pages

I have done some updates to my tollhouses website here.

I have added a page for Wiltshire, as I have just finished its map. Also I have roughed out pages for Herefordshire and Worcestershire, as I have a couple of photos to go into those already.

I need to choose the next county to map, I am thinking Dorset.

Sunday 4 March 2012

Wiltshire mapped

I have finally finished my first pass of Wiltshire. There are alot of tollhouses in this county and it took a while to find them all on the maps.

The map is below, and the kml file can be found here.


View Wiltshire tollhouses in a larger map