Yesterday or the day before, Florian contacted me to see could we map hogbacks on OpenStreetMap. Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Florian and I have spoken at two Digital Humanities conferences about citizen science and mapping and Wikidata and all that craic before, and one of our co-panellists Meagan’s doctoral thesis was about hogbacks. These are very large stones carved into the shape of very likely buildings (longhouses mostly) and date to the 10th to 12th century. They are pretty cool, to be honest. They are called hogbacks, because they also resemble the curved back of a pig, especially, when the carving is very worn and cannot be made out, which is maybe why they called them that back in the 19th century. The Vikings presumably had a far cooler name for them, but they didn’t write that down for us. Those stones were used as grave markers. (I don’t watch any of the Viking Netflix and other series, but maybe they made an appearance? Let me know in the comments - as if this was YouTube.)

Hogbacks survive or are known to have survived (who knows what might still lie undiscovered underground) in Northengland and to a lesser extent and with stylistic differences in Scotland, Cornwall (where they are called “coped stone”). One example each is known in Ireland and Wales.

Following the pattern of ogham stones for which I did go through the proposal process, Florian and I decided that we would go for the tag historic=hogback with the additional subclassification of hogback=coped_stone for the Cornish examples. I made the “executive decision” that we would be the only people mapping them anyway and that the number is so small that a proposal process would be a waste of time. I’m prepared to be judged for that.

It turns out that two had already been mapped, one as a historic=memorial and the other as historic=tomb. So as to not interfere with other people’s tagging, I only added hogback to the values. They are in a way memorials and mark tombs, but they are not tombs themselves, only grave markers, but I’ll give the other mapper the benefit of the doubt. In several cases, they have also been moved (into museums), so they don’t even mark the grave any longer.

In my opinion, they are special enough to deserve their own value, even if there are so few; it would be good to be able to filter for them.

Florian needed all this for a conference (OSM in action!) next week, so I quickly wrote a Wiki page for them: osm.wiki/Tag:historic%3Dhogback. As of today, it will say that there are none mapped, but that’s because Florian mapped two of them yesterday, when we hadn’t agreed on the tagging scheme.

If I get a chance to go to the one in Ireland, I will make a video. And a 3D scan!