14,659 Parish Maps from England and Wales!

Cassini – Old Parish Maps

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(Sample)  (Keys & Legends)

Cassini Maps has created these Old Parish Maps an essential resource for family history researchers, genealogists and historians. As parish boundaries have changed over time, its essential to know where your ancestors lived and to understand the landscape that shaped their lives.

• Parish Maps provide a direct link to Census and Parish Records.
• Download the PDF to view on screen and print at home.
• Parish boundaries as they were in 1911.
• Detailed Ordnance Survey mapping published between 1880 – 1910.
• Downloadable PDFs of English and Welsh Parishes.
• Scale: Street-level mapping – 1:10,000 (originally 1:10,560).

Visit Cassini’s Old Parish Maps page

14,659 individual historical Parishes Maps are now available to download and to print at home. These maps provide a vital link to Parish Records and show in great detail the historical Parishes in which your ancestors lived and worked. Each maps is taken from the Ordnance Survey County Series 1:10,560 maps from the cusp of 19th and 20th centuries and show the Historical Parish Boundary as recorded at the time of the 1911 census.

About the Maps
The origins of the six-inch to the mile maps (1:10,560) date back to 1824 when this scale was adopted for a survey of Ireland. By 1840 it had been decided to extend the project to Great Britain. To conduct a survey at such a scale, every corner of the country, including private property, would need to be visited. The following year, the Survey Act was passed which gave surveyors the right to enter any land for the purposes of carrying out their duties. It also specified the types of boundaries that the new maps were to display (down to parish level).

Cassini has reproduced County Series Parish Maps for the whole of England and Wales. This involved combining more than one original sheet to give an appropriate area of coverage. In the process, the maps have been digitally enhanced and enlarged slightly to 1:10,000 to bring them into line with more recent maps at this metric scale.

Cassini Maps

Map of the month – The lost village of Imber

The lost village of Imber, Wiltshire (County series 1:10,000)

Described by Ella Noyes in the 1890’s, Imber was “one straggling street of old cottages and farmsteads winding along the hollow under the sheltering elms.” The village of Imber had been a remote village nestled in a small valley on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. It had for centuries made the most of its secluded existence by surviving largely unscathed by both civil unrest and pestilence that had from time to time existed elsewhere in England.

It was later in the 1890’s that its fortunes started to change with the arrival of the Army on Salisbury Plain. The War Office concluded its search for a large training environment with the purchase of over 40,000 acres of land on the east of the plain.

With the advent of WW1, training increased significantly around Imber with the villagers suffering virtual imprisonment as the surrounding countryside was shelled.

The village struggled to maintain its self-sufficiency on the cratered landscape it had sought to farm in the post war years and its decline continued until 1943, when, with the village now in the centre of the military’s western ranges, the inhabitants were given 46 days to leave.

There is little of the original village remaining today and nearly half of the standing structures were built by the army.

If you have an interesting story and would like to see a historical map of your area then why not let us know by emailing us.