It took more than 6 months to reach my personal target (map a boundary set by various roads, culminating at the ancient – although now mostly gently rotting – centre of Carlton). Now, I do admit that I’ve still got to complete a bit of the extreme west end of this mapping (Porchester Gardens), but the greatest extent has been done. In the light of that, perhaps I can indulge myself a little.

Close by the junction of Burton Road and Cavendish Drive is the Army Reserve Centre (‘ARC’) of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. They are a cavalry unit, and this is not a bad picture of one of their vehicles:

Useful for shifting the worst of the traffic jams, I would have thought.

I wrote in June 2016 about CCTV cameras on Carlton Hill top, but it seems that in Carlton centre they take their Neighbourhood Watch even more seriously:

never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, “Meditation XVII”
John Donne
(written in 1624 whilst Dean of St. Paul’s, following a potentially fatal bout of spotted fever)

A young chap that lives in West View Road, Carlton (a private, unadopted road) explained during my latest mapping session that his house is subject to Chancel Repair Liability. The object in the middling distance below is responsible for that (it is called ‘Gedling Church’):

The Carlton householder explained Chancel Tax as applying to those that “can hear the Church bells”. The full story (Wikipedia) is less romantic and much more complex, but the statement is accurate enough in it’s way. It is a uniquely English & Welsh story, involving medieval (pre-1536) church history, Henry VIII & rich men’s responsibilities that have come to haunt modern land-owners (those that own their own house).

… See full entry

As yet another in the “for heaven’s sake, what on earth has this got to do with mapping” series of incidental snapshots, drawn from life & art seen on the streets of Carlton & Gedling, as your intrepid mapper penetrates deeper & deeper into the hitherto unexplored heartlands of England, I bring to you one of the unacknowledged obsessions of the Brits: Fairies

This plaque was on a house on one of the eastern slopes of Marshall Hill and caught my attention immediately. The lady householder told me that she purchased it a few years back via the internet.

The Oirish (and, indeed, all the celts in the British Isles) (which is to say, everyone except those descendants of William the Bastard) freely admit to an active engagement with the Little Folk. As is so often the case, this is just the English being disingenuous, since they are as fascinated by the natural spirits of this place as everyone else.

I’ve just added old_name=Stoney Pit Lane to Cavendish Road. This information comes from a historian within #66 (start-date=1930), a splendid lady who, due to old age, now has difficulty weeding her garden. Her body may be becoming infirm, but her mind is as sharp as a pin.

The houses on the north side of Cavendish Road increase quite normally until Belper Avenue. The last house (Short Cut To Beauty) is actually numbered on Belper Av; it’s neighbour is 78 Cavendish Road, and the next house on the other side of Belper Av is Dom’s Barbers, which is number 206. Originally, Stoney Pit Lane finished at Number 78. Then near the end of the last millennium the road was both extended & renamed to Cavendish Road. This information was not recorded previously.

My historian’s mother was born in 1900 & began to attend school in 1903. That was not normal for the times. Each morning, her mum’s cousin would call at the house in the morning, make a fuss of her mother, then carry on to school. Then her mother began to follow behind her cousin to school. Each morning a teacher would bring her mother back home until, eventually, after days & days of this happening, they let her stay. Naturally, she sat in on the lessons. By the age of 12 her mum had passed every exam that they could throw at her.

My historian also told me about Farmer Kerry & Farmer Tattersall. Dark-haired Kerry was the farmer that owned the fields on the College (south) side of Carlton Road, whilst blonde-haired Tattersall was the farmer that owned the fields on the Petrol Station (north) side of the same road. She went to school with Alma & Olga (Farmer Tattersall’s daughters), and explained to me that the farmer insisted on having roads named after his daughters when he sold his fields.

Another snippet was that the authorities had to grade the top off Carlton Hill, so that the trams could get over it.

… See full entry

I’ve written before at my surprise in finding large numbers of houses in Carlton, Nottingham NG4, UK built between the 1880s & 1930s, that still had outdoor khazis. The ones that I used as my illustration were opposite the middle of the Carlton Cemetery (16 July, Worth Street).

In the past 2 months I have mapped clockwise down Cavendish Road, Coningswath Road and all the roads of Marshall Hill, Westdale Lane West then all the way back down Cavendish Lane on the other side of the road and yesterday (Thu 15 Sep) struck the western end of the same Cemetery. It should, therefore, not be a surprise to find some more Khazis outside each of these (at a guess) 1930s flats, but it was.

There was a service road supplying (what is now) some waste ground at the back of the flats (you can see the Cemetery on the other side of the fence:—

Whilst exploring that I spotted a walk-through to the rear of the flats, and there were the khazis (these are for 4 flats, 2 in each of 2 adjacent houses):—

… See full entry

I’ve mentioned Stone Lions before, and have seen many, many more since then in the gardens of Carlton & Marshall Hill (and ignored most, as I do not wish to bore with unnecessary repetition), but these pink-eyed lions on Cavendish Road seemed to call for attention:—

The same 4 lions (only 3 pictured here) can be seen in Google StreetView, but they are grimy & street-dark (Cavendish Road is a main thoroughfare for cars & buses from Nottingham & Carlton). Since then, the householder has not only had them blast-cleaned to bright-white but has had their eyes painted pink. Excellent!

In complete contrast, here is a garden in Cromford Avenue, sheltered & away from that main road:—

… See full entry

I’ve come across my second un-named un-adopted road (2 in 6 months). I cannot seem to find any info on the wiki for how to map these. I used the following page as my reference:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway

In the absence of specific info, in brief I mapped using the following values:

highway=residential
noname=yes
noexit=yes (it is a cul-de-sac) (note: this value generally NOT advised (see comments))
unadopted=yes

Links to wiki pages on values to use, and why, much appreciated.

For those unfamiliar with the term “unadopted road” (they are common in England), the following comes from a UK Government publication:

‘Unadopted’ roads are those roads not maintained by a highway authority as defined by Highways Act 1980

For most unadopted residential roads the duty to maintain it falls to the frontagers, ie the owners of the property fronting that road, which may include those where the side, or length, of their property fronts the unadopted road.

A note on wiki URLs: HTTP fails to redirect to HTTPS:

When finding the wiki Key:highway page just now Google gave me a HTTP url for the page. I manually changed it to HTTPS, and it showed fine. However, it did NOT redirect from port-80 to port-443 of it’s own accord. It was announced recently that Google is due to begin penalising HTTP pages. Act now, webmasters!

I’ve been mapping houses south of Westdale Lane, Mapperly/Porchester/Gedling/Carlton (people seem to give it different names - I call it Marshall Hill) for the last couple of weeks. I kept seeing butterflies fixed to the outside of houses, but they seemed exceptionally kitsch (see the comments), so I ignored them. However, finally, the garage at number 10 won me over, so here it is for your delight:

Ultimately the answer will lay in whether you want to get married, or not, and whether OSM can source open-GPX, shape files, whatever, for all the UK Ecclesiastical Parishes.

Until the Parish Councils Act of 1894, there was zero difference between a Civil Parish and an Ecclesiastical Parish. The 1894 act extracted all non-Church features & vested them in newly-created Civil Parishes. The principal feature that the Established Church retains, and which affects all members of the public living within an Ecclesiastical Parish, is the right to be married within their local Church. Now obviously, in order to be able to know which is that ‘local Church’, a person needs to be able to search for it upon a suitably equipped map. At this moment, that is NOT OSM.

example: the Porchester Ecclesiastical Boundary

11 September: I stated in my 27 August Diary that “The Ecclesiastical Boundary runs down Marshall Hill Drive”; not true. The vicar at St James, Porchester, the Revd. Phil Williams, gave me a copy of the Porchester parish boundary (many thanks to him) and the Boundary runs along Valley Road and across the bottom of Marshall Hill Drive, and then up Simkin Avenue. However, at no point does it run up (nor down) Marshall Hill Drive apart from that tiny little segment at the bottom.

For reference, the Porchester Ecclesiastical Boundary (Diocese of Southwell & Nottingham, Gedling Deanery) that the vicar gave me was traced on an Ordnance Survey map (grinds teeth) and only part-follows existing streets:

Starting in the north-west corner:

… See full entry

This is on Cavendish Road, Carlton NG4, just after meeting Coningswath Road. It has a similar shape to a Boundary Marker, but does not have any of the normal markings for Nottingham or Carlton (only a capital ‘V’ + numeral ‘3’). Anyone have any idea what it is?

next day added:
fwiw it is on the map here.

added Friday 9 Sep:

@Piero Nussio sent me a personal message, and it looks to be an interesting possibility:

The one shown in the photo is a tipical “milestone” (in italian: pietra miliare). Was in the roads to show distance from the beginning of the road. The capital “v” stands for the number “5” in the roman way to write numbers -was the symbol for an hand, wich has 5 fingers- So says it’s the fifth mile from the beginning. The other 3 is an arabic (nowdays number) sign for the distance whithin the current mile. The use of arabic numbers (instead of “III”, in the roman way) means that the stone is more recent than middle age, when arabic numbers went in use.

… See full entry

These are pansies in a garden in Cavendish Road, Carlton (love the Meercat & horses!):

There just has to be a PhD paper waiting to be written on the use of plaster dolls in English gardens. They are virtually ubiquitous in Nottingham NG4.

I cannot find the IRC details to report these any other way, so here are links to recent spam:

1. Jabong.c0m Coupon codes, Deals & Cashback… (removed)
2. การกิน ทำให้คุณดูอ่อนกว่าวัย
   Translation: Earlier today, I’ll get it. To eat some food and make you look younger tender… (removed)

(many thanks to those that removed them)

coda:

I finally found the email from SomeoneElse buried under a hundred others giving direction to report spammers in the #osm-dev IRC channel on OTRS - see OSM wiki help. Maybe next time.

An upload has just been made by myself for Marwood Road, Carlton NG4, UK and it has four houses in a row (2 sets of semi-detached) that are each numbered ‘1’ (and two next-door to them that are each numbered ‘375’), and yet they are all correctly numbered. What is going on?

Now yes, I’m being a little bit naughty in my description, because two of those houses are numbered ‘1a’ and ‘1b’, but the other two are each “1 Marwood” and are part of the same semi-detached house. In fact, whilst surveying it was worse, because whilst these four houses are obviously near the beginning of the street there were two houses before them, one of which was positioned on Cavendish Road, but the bungalow was clearly positioned on Marwood Road. That bungalow was residential & occupied (though the owners were out) and no-one else on the street knew what it’s number was - and neither did it display one. Truly, this was a street designed to give taxi-drivers a nervous breakdown.

This is the street: Marwood Road, Carlton NG4; the houses concerned are at the eastern end, on the south-side of the street. ‘1a’ and ‘1b’ are part of a semi-detached house that is too new (as is the bungalow) to be shown on the current Google satellite view, although Bing does show them (it is normally the other way around) (Bing metadata capture date of “10/1/2011-3/26/2012”). West of [‘1a’, ‘1b’] is [1, 1]. The first house is 1 Marwood Road, and the second is 1 Marwood Crescent. Gaah!

I decided that to answer the mystery of the bungalow was going to require some hard snooping; there must be a number somewhere. And there was (carefully hidden in plain sight, next to the door, but much too small to read from the street):

… See full entry

English Eccentricity #1

Seen today whilst mapping in Carlton NG4:

Look, the guy wants a xmassy-sorta fibre-glass polar-bear on the bay-window of his house, and if he does want a sorta-xmassy fibre-glass polar-bear on the bay-window of his house, I say “why not?” (though it could do with a wash).

Today’s Weather Alert from weather.com said: “CHANCE OF RAIN: 100%” (they weren’t kidding). In typical macho style I put on my rain-proof jacket & went out mapping anyway. I stayed out too long.

Surprisingly, the rain doesn’t penetrate the smartphone — a credit to the design — but it does interfere with the capacitance on the glass surface, and that interferes with it’s touch-sensitive design, which becomes a real pain after a short while. In spite of it all I managed whilst mapping to get a couple of photos of interesting house numbers to show here…

The first (above) comes from very close to last week’s MPG. I think that some may think this a little twee, and the mixture of Japanese-inspired artwork & renaissance-inspired cherubs is certainly odd, but I don’t care - the owners like them & so do I.

For a complete contrast (below) how about this black cat (you can possibly detect traces of rain on the lens here):

… See full entry

I try to feature the best stuff I come across whilst mapping. This was the latest:

Others have been: Ladybirds + squirrel; Flowerpot man + Gargoyles; No Riff-Raff; Floral Abundance; Tweety Pie, Kenya Art + Plaster Dolls; Leaded Light door + another high-class door-sign. That last link also contains links to previous street art featured in these posts. I do spoil you, y’know.

Oscar – the southern lion in Slab Square – was first featured in Stone Lions of England. Here he is again:

I’ve long wanted a photo of his northern companion, Leo (although do not bother to ask why I did not photograph both on the first occasion, as I cannot recall), but I do not get into town often, nor want to stay when I get there. I managed it today, although the bright sun possibly defeated my smartphone’s circuitry:

… See full entry

Mapping on the flat bit of Marshall Hill at the top & a bit of the wall at the front of one house had some Ladybirds fastened to it. The woman of the house told me that the rear of their place had loads of different things attached to it, and she had recently let some spread to the front. I asked if there was a particular reason for the ladybirds, and she said “because I like them, and they look good”.

And for the same reason, here’s a little tableaux spotted at a bungalow near Marshall Hill Drive:

… See full entry

My very first Diary entry concerned paranoia within the English Middle-Class, and a July entry documented a slow pursuit by such a guy up a steep hill. There have been many others, always a pain but undocumented, and the “Middle-Class ‘Paranoid Guy’” (MPG) has therefore become a stock item for me. However, I’ve now discovered how to teach others to discover his lair (read on)…

Yesterday’s (Monday, 29 August 2016) MPG was dislodged from his lair in a bungalow in The Mount, a Neighbourhood Watch area near the top of Marshall Hill. Now, the opening sentence of this paragraph has actually just given you some important clues; one or more of the following will make it likely that a MPG is around:—

1. A street with a pretentious name
2. A detached/semi-detached house or (best of all) a bungalow
   (these men—they are almost always men—are normally retired) (like me)
3. Their street has a Neighbourhood Watch and they are active within it

… See full entry