Friday 18 March 2011

Naming country roads

A lovely day tempted us out, first to do some jobs on the allotment, then trying to resolve a few names on the country roads. We found a couple of small residential roads missed on the first pass. We found two war memorials, a small church, some allotments and a village hall previously missed too.


Before we went out I spotted something we've seen before, or so I thought. There looked like a road name on OS locator that looked like it was really the name of a farm. There is a road called Highgate heading west out of Cherry Burton, which is well signed. OS Locator shows a small section of road called "Dunken Hill Highgate". I expected to find a farm called Dunken Hill and that the same mistake as we have seen before, that is an address has somehow become treated as a road name.

We found the farm called Dunken Hill, exactly as expected, but when I got home I looked at OS StreetView. It shows the road name as Dunken Hill (without the Highgate bit). It shows the farm name as Dunkenhill Farm. There is also a nearby area also labelled as Dunken Hill and the road crosses part of the edge of it. There were no signs, but I decided to accept the OS StreetView name. The OS Locator still seemed muddled and being different from OS StreetView is something that happens. If anyone knows better I will accept their wisdom or knowledge.

I'm not actually too bothered about some of these country road names, the roads are there, there are no houses or businesses on many of them except farms and they have names of their own. Many country roads have no name boards, so using the name to navigate isn't actually possible on the ground. Making sure the missing roads are added is much, much more useful, but hunting down road names can be an excuse for a pleasant ride out.

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