(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

Woodsetts appeared on my screen (literally & metaphorically) whilst entering the very wonderful Worksop Unparished parish on to the OSM map. The northern edge of Worksop parish that I was working on (pun deliberate) was at the southern edge of Woodsetts CP. However, the Woodsetts parish line seemed to be 200m or more adrift from it’s true place.

‘CP’ is short for “Civic Parish”, and is the smallest of the English Administrative boundaries (admin_level=10). Woodsetts CP was entered before my OSM time, in the days when one of the few bits of reference material available was NPE maps. Now, I understand fully that “something is better than nothing” (I already have that attitude to Bing imagery), but when I see “source=NPE” I have now come to expect wild inaccuracies. And am rarely disappointed, with Woodsetts CP as my current example.

Woodsetts Road is a tertiary highway that runs north out of Woodsetts village. After a short distance it meets Acorn Lodge and changes into Gilding Wells Road; to the East of that road is a farmer’s field that contains the site of a Cartographic atrocity!

One of the parishes to the north of Woodsetts is Dinnington St. John’s. Did you spot the single quote in that name? Well, unfortunately csmale did not. URLs within his Parish page use single quotes as delimiters within HTML <a href=...> syntax, but have not themselves been encoded, which means that the Dinnington St. John’s link is ineffective. It should be http://csmale.dev.openstreetmap.org/os_boundaryline/parish_region\Rotherham_District\Dinnington_St._John's_CP.gpx (which will work in a browser or JOSM). However, in html page source the quote (‘'’) should have been rendered as ‘%27’ (so-called “percent encoding”) (this also normally applies to spaces, but all spaces have already been transformed to underscores (‘_’)).

Having crafted an effective Dinnington St. John’s CP.gpx url I can see that the boundary never goes East of Gilding Wells Road, although the Woodsetts CP boundary travels across the northern edge of that field until it meets a bunch of Regional (admin_level=5) & other boundaries running north-south along the course of a stream that can be seen in Bing to clearly run through the centre of the wheat-field. Unfortunately:—

1. OSM currently shows the boundary as “Dinnington St. John’s TC”
2. The mis-named Dinnington St. John’s TC currently runs where Woodsetts CP is supposed to run (across the northern part of that field), and follows the Regional boundaries south for 200m or so.
3. Woodsetts CP does NOT run across the northern part of that field
4. Woodsetts CP currently has an invented path which follows (what appears to be from Bing) a dried-up stream-bed across the middle of the field 200m or so south of it’s true route
5. The mis-named Dinnington St. John’s TC follows the Woodsetts CP invented path to return back to it’s accepted path
6. The OSM route for the North-South waterway bears little relation to current reality

As you can see, it’s all a bit of an abortion. I’m getting out my wellies, face-mask & chainsaw as I write these words, and will write more after some serious surgery.

Added later:

After a stunningly large amount of time spent understanding how it should be laid out, and what had been done wrong, it took comparatively little time to repair the parish & lay it out correctly. It is now uplifted. Here a few final thoughts:

• It is a small parish (11.4 km) but has an incredible twist‘n’turn boundary in places; I guess that at some time in the past farmers have argued the toss on where the boundary should run.
• The NPE-sourced boundary was stupifyingly bad; up to 200m wrong in places. It has been that bad for years. Since the truly bad errors occurred within fields, I guess that the few foxes & rabbits affected found it difficult to operate the OSM keyboards to complain or fix it.
• It took a tremendous amount of time to nip‘n’tuck the NPE lines to fit the OS_BoundaryLine
• According to Wikipedia, Woodsetts is within the Yorkshire and the Humber region (admin_level=5). There do not appear to be any regional shapefiles (untrue! they can be downloaded from OSM).
• By the same authority, Woodsetts is within the South Yorkshire county (admin_level=6). That does not appear within the shapefile admin counties, but instead is within the ceremonial counties.
• By the same authority, Woodsetts is within the Rotherham district (admin_level=8).

Dinnington St. John’s now needs a similar fix due to it’s involvement within the earlier surgery. I sincerely hope that this is not going to turn out to be a Pudding Lane affair.

Coda

Above I state: OSM currently shows the boundary as “Dinnington St. John's TC”, and stated that the name was wrong. This declaration of error was made on the basis that the OS showed it as “Dinnington St. John’s CP”. On the basis that the OS .shape files were from Feb 2016, whilst the original boundary was from 6 or more years ago, I re-named the boundary to the OS name.

Whoops-a-daisy. In an extended piece of research that I’m due to post soonish, a current Parliament Research Paper includes “Town Council” as one of 6 different styles of name for Civil Parishes to adopt (and not one of those names is “Civil Parish”). Then, to rub my face in it, a recent (29 April 2016) consultation document from Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council was initiated by Dinnington St. John’s Town Council. They are very much alive and active.

It is a moot point whether ‘TC’ (or, indeed, ‘CP’) should get included in to the admin_level=10 name, since that name gets adopted for portrayal within Location, Search & Naming services within OSM. Also, in the past senior mappers would make unilateral decisions about these things and I see that I have begun to adopt those ways myself. After all, <sarcasm>dictators are so much better at getting the trains to run on time, are they not? However, these days we all wear each others’ underpants and, if the plebs are not allowed to think that they are involved in the decision they tend to get antsy, so it had better be put to a referendum, or something</sarcasm>.

For Dinnington St John’s CP I am going to leave well alone. The Maarssen Mapper has been making extensive changes all around there, so it is his problem now.