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.

Memorials

The project of the week has not really rung my bell before, but this week it is to add war memorials, so I added a few local ones (sorry for the quality of the photos, but the weather was bad and the light poor).

Welton

Brough

Brantingham

South Cave

North Ferriby

Plans

I heard on the local radio that a large development is being proposed in Brough, a few miles from my home. There was a display in the Brough library about the proposed new homes and commercial area, so I thought I'd go and take a look.

Brough has been very substantially extended over the past ten years. When I was at school there was a very large area of greenhouses given over largely to growing tomatoes and cucumbers and in the summer there were always employment opportunities picking the fruit for anyone who didn't mind being roasted alive in the greenhouses and scratched to bits on the cucumber plants. All of the glasshouses, warehousing and packing sheds have long ago been demolished and a huge new housing estate and a school built there. There have been other new facilities built too, such as a supermarket, health centre and, bucking the national trend, a pub. One of the new facilities is a library and community centre where the plans were on show.

The plans were laid out on display boards, with black and white maps showing Brough and the new roads and building areas sketched over as coloured blocks. I can't reproduce them here for fear of breaking the developer's copyright. The maps were very old OS ones. They showed the market gardens as though they still existed, with the existing, new estate blocked in colour which made it look part of the development. All of the existing, new facilities and some existing roads were drawn in as though they were to be added by the developer. The development that really is to be added is largely on open fields but it is partly on the airfield currently owned and operated by BAe. This is fiercely guarded and is not available for private aircraft to use, so only a few aircraft use it each week. One interesting part of the proposal is to build a new supermarket. Tesco already have expressed an interest in building a supermarket near the A63, not far from this proposed development and the developers are latching on to the hostility to Tesco's plans by saying that their supermarket would be instead of Tesco's planned one.

I have no particular objections to the development, but it is interesting to see how maps are being used to portray a developer's specific agenda and attempt to put them in a good light. As to replacing Tesco's proposal, well Tesco have the cash and planning experience to usually get what they want.

Bridges & stuff

When I look at at KeepRight it flags up all sorts of things including where a road crosses a waterway when there's no bridge. There is a small waterway running through Hull called the Beverley and Barmston Drain. I wasn't sure that all of roads that pass over it did so on bridges rather than it simply running through a culvert of some kind, so we went to take a look. The simple answer is there were bridges everywhere, though the pictured one is actually one we already knew about.

As usual when we go out looking for one thing we discover something else. In this case we saw a new industrial estate which is still being completed and a housing estate that is much bigger than it was the last time we checked. The industrial estate didn't have any road names nor a name for the estate, but I expect this to change as the place is finished. The housing estate (pictured) is also still being developed but at least has a road name and also plenty of mud.

The autumn colours in the trees and bushes have been great this year and in spite of a windy day there are still lots of leaves to be seen.

How fast is Autumn

The roundabout on the A1079 is complete, but the link road from it to the caravan works is not accessible yet. The temporary speed limits have been removed. The new traffic signals on the junctions between the A164 and the A1079 are working and all of this is now in the OSM database.

The leaves are changing colour here, a bit late this year, but they look particularly good. I have heard that spring spreads from the south of England northwards at about walking pace, but does autumn spread south at a similar pace?

Link roads, bugs and limits

We needed some compost for potting up winter plants and I know that a new link road is being built near to the garden centre, so I thought I'd check it out. I know the road is being built because the A1079 has a frustrating new 30 mph speed limits and speed cameras on it. A roundabout is being added to help the link road join into the main road. The link load is, I think, only going to Swift caravans to help them move their raw materials onto their site and especially move the large mobile homes and caravans they produce off site, directly onto a substantial road and not through Cottingham village. The new roads cuts across North Moor Lane, and would have provided a short cut into Cottingham from the A1079, something the planners want to avoid, so North Moor Lane has been cut in half to prevent this rat-run being created.

Part of the reason I looked at this area is that a newbie had added a huge stretch of 30 mph on the A1079 in response to a Skobbler bug report. The 30 mph limit had already been added, but rather than accept that the editor just added extra 30 mph areas. Bug reporting is a great idea, but it would be nice if people would actually visit the reported area before 'fixing' it. I have sorted it out now, but the new roundabout will still need adding when I can get a GPS trace around it.

A little bit of mapping

It's been a quiet mapping time, but today after a discussion about some areas of Hull I found myself checking out some of the ten foots off Spring Bank West. A ten foot is the local name for an alley. They run behind rows of houses which are often terraces so these ten foots give access to the back of the houses. The land that fronts onto the ten foot are almost all garages, maybe at one time it would have been a garden. A few of these alleys have been closed to public access with gates. In fact I have no idea of the access status of an ungated ten foot. They tend to be untidy and unkempt and now the wheelie bins just make things worse.