Guide

Using Historic Maps

Tithe maps for the 1840s, Ordnance Survey six-inch for the 1880s onward, and both are free. This is the fastest route into the history of any Powys place.

If you want to know what happened to a place in Powys, start with maps rather than with books. Two free resources will answer most questions in about twenty minutes.

The tithe maps, 1838 to 1850

The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 converted tithes from a payment in kind into a money rent, which meant every parish in England and Wales had to be surveyed and every parcel of land valued.

What that produced is astonishing and underused: a large-scale map of almost every parish in Wales, with every field numbered, and an accompanying schedule — the apportionment — listing for each number the owner, the occupier, the field name, the acreage and the land use.

It is, in effect, a household and land census of rural Wales just before the great depopulation began.

The National Library of Wales publishes the whole set for Wales, maps and transcribed apportionments together, free, at Places of Wales. You can click a field and read its name.

Field names are the payoff. They record what ground was used for centuries after the use stopped, and in parishes that later lost the Welsh language they preserve it wholesale.

Ordnance Survey County Series, 1870s onward

The six-inch and twenty-five-inch County Series maps are the other essential layer. They show every building, wall, well, quarry, kiln, footpath and tree line, with heights and often with the names of individual farms and fields.

The National Library of Scotland's map viewer carries the Welsh sheets georeferenced, with a side-by-side and a swipe comparison against modern mapping and satellite imagery. It is the single most useful free tool for landscape history in Britain and it costs nothing.

The obvious use is counting. Count the buildings in an upland parish on the first edition, count them now, and the scale of what left becomes a number rather than an impression.

The less obvious use is finding things. Antiquities are marked in Gothic lettering. Mills, kilns, smithies, chapels and schools are named. A great many earthworks now under bracken were recorded when the surveyors walked the ground.

Estate and enclosure maps

Older and patchier but far richer where they exist.

Estate maps were commissioned by landowners, generally from the seventeenth century onward, and often show buildings in elevation, land use in colour and tenants by name. Powys Archives at Llandrindod and the National Library at Aberystwyth hold the county's collections.

Enclosure awards accompany the parliamentary Acts of roughly 1790 to 1830 and record exactly who received which piece of former common, which is the documentary counterpart to those straight walls on the open hill.

Most of this material is not digitised. Going in person is the only route, and archive staff are generally very willing to help someone who arrives with a specific parish and a specific question.

Lidar

Welsh Government publishes lidar coverage through DataMapWales. Lidar is an airborne laser survey that records ground level beneath vegetation, and hillshaded lidar imagery shows earthworks that are entirely invisible on the ground and under tree cover.

It has transformed upland archaeology in Wales over the last decade. It is free and it works in a browser.

A method that works

Take a place. Find it on the tithe map and read the field names and the occupiers. Move to the first edition six-inch and note what buildings existed. Swipe to modern imagery and see what has gone. Then check lidar for anything the modern surface has hidden.

Then, and only then, look for what has been written about it. You will know what questions to ask.