Using Maps to Trace Old Field Names

By Singing Folk Songs with Community Choirs
Comments 35
2 Aug 2026

Using Maps to Trace Old Field Names

Start with the schedule, not the map

A tithe map on its own is a beautiful but largely silent document. It shows you the shape of every close, orchard and paddock in the parish, usually coloured up in washes of pink, green and yellow, but it will not tell you what any of them were called. For that you need the apportionment schedule, the accompanying book that lists every numbered parcel with its name, its state of cultivation, its acreage and the names of the landowner and the occupier. Always work from the number on the map to the entry in the schedule, and never the other way round. Numbers were reused across a parish in later revisions, and a mistake here will send you chasing the wrong field for an afternoon.

The three document families worth chasing

Most West Country field-name research rests on three bodies of material, and it is worth knowing what each was for.

Tithe maps and apportionments, drawn up after the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, cover roughly three-quarters of English parishes. They are the single best snapshot of field names before agricultural mechanisation reshaped the landscape.
Enclosure awards, mostly between about 1750 and 1850, with their accompanying plans and awards. In the West Country much of the land was already enclosed by then, so what survives tends to cover the wastes, moors and commons, and the names there are often older and rougher.
Estate plans and surveys, made for a single landed estate rather than a parish. They can reach back into the seventeenth century and often carry field names the tithe commissioners ignored or tidied up.

Look for these at county record offices, local studies libraries and diocesan record offices, which sometimes hold tithe material alongside glebe terriers and faculty papers.

Reading the words on the page

Old field names are not decorative. They are working descriptions, and once you learn a dozen recurring elements, whole parishes start to make sense. A leaze is pasture, usually the better grazing nearest the farmstead. A worth or worthy is an enclosure carved out of waste. A tyning is a small hedged close, common in Somerset and Dorset. Ham and combe describe the shape of the ground, while slad marks a slope or shallow valley. Cornish names bring their own vocabulary: tre for a farmstead, hendra for an old settlement, and the stone-faced banks that still divide those fields.

Some names carry worship and dissent alongside farming. Chapel Field, Bethel, Salem, Providence and Ebenezer frequently mark ground attached to a Nonconformist meeting house, or a spot where open-air preaching drew a congregation long before a building was raised. A Gospel Oak or Meeting Close in a parish with a strong Methodist tradition is worth noting in your notebook.

Laying old over new

To compare, you need to align the two maps, and the honest truth is that hand-drawn plans never line up perfectly. Tithe maps were drawn at roughly six chains to the inch, but accuracy varied enormously between parishes; some are careful surveys, others are little better than sketches. Start by finding at least three fixed control points that have not moved: a church tower, a road junction, a farmstead, a bridge, or a stretch of parish boundary. Align on those, then check the scale before trusting anything in between.

If you prefer working digitally, scan or photograph the historic map, load it as an image overlay in a mapping application that allows this, and set the transparency so both layers show at once. Otherwise, print the old map at a known scale, lay it over a modern printout on a window or lightbox, and trace. Historic six-inch and twenty-five-inch survey maps, held at many record offices and libraries, act as a useful intermediate layer between the tithe era and the present day.

What the changed boundaries tell you

Once the overlays sit together, the differences become the story. A field that appears on the tithe map as five separate closes and today is one large arable parcel tells you about hedgerow removal, often in the decades after the Second World War. Land recorded as orchard that has since vanished speaks to the collapse of the cider and market-garden trades. Parcels marked as waste or common that were later enclosed show where pressure on land was greatest.

Names survive their features with remarkable stubbornness. A housing estate built on old pasture may still keep Orchard Close or Long Leaze on its street signs, and a modern field gate may stand exactly where a tithe map shows a gap in the hedge.

Taking it outside

The last stage is fieldwork, and it is the most enjoyable. Take your annotated overlay and walk the boundaries. Look for hedge banks with stone facing, wide enough to be centuries old; old coppice stools; gateposts stranded in the middle of a hedge where a gateway was once closed; and the damp line of a former ditch. Species-rich hedges, with hazel, field maple and dogwood alongside hawthorn, often mark older boundaries than single-species thorn, which tends to indicate a nineteenth-century enclosure. Photograph what you find, note the grid reference, and add it to your map. Every parish in the West Country has these traces waiting, and a little patience with a schedule and a ruler will bring them up beautifully.

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5 Comments

Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply
- John Abraham says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
  
  I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
  Reply
  - Robert Sonnysays Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
    
    I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
    Reply
Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply

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