Tuesday 16 November 2010

Graveyards and sliding churches

A wonderfully crisp and sunny afternoon drew me out into a few local villages looking for more war memorials. The three we found were all in church yards, one being the isolated one at Rowley. Rowley is a very small hamlet, which has a rather nice country house hotel, Rowley Manor surrounded by a farm and a few houses and the church of St Peters. The actual civil parish of Rowley is quite large and takes in the village of Little Weighton. We walked around the perimeter wall to get a trace for it and looked out over the strange lych gate. It is has a path in the church yard to it, but outside of the boundary wall there is just a paddock.

Skidby

Rowley

Walkington
The war memorials are easy to spot because they have the wreaths of poppies on them. I've contacted the UK National Inventory of War Memorials to see if they want to include any mapping on their web site, but I've not had a reply yet.

When I came to enter my traces into the OSM DB, I used JOSM and had a slippy map overlay for the Ordnance Survey OpenData. The area I was looking at shows how badly misaligned some of the OS OpenData overlay is. I wanted to add the churches but the (crude) building outlines in the OS overlay were way off according to my traces. This is a common and consistent problem, both with my current GPS and its predecessor which fell to bits. The overlay always shows objects further south than my traces. I trust the traces more than I trust the overlay's position. In the end I traced a church outline to get the orientation right and slid it to a more reasonable place based on my traces.

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