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Use the code C-EASTER15 to claim your 30% discount on all maps on the Cassini website. Simply enter the voucher code when prompted during checkout.
P&P applies as normal.
One week Special Offer RRP £12.99 – Now only £5.99
Offer ends 16th Feb 2015
Cassini Maps has created 14,659 individual historical Parishes Maps, which form an essential resource for local 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).
(Sample) (Keys & Legends)
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.
To buy your Old Parish Maps please visit Cassini Maps
Old Sarum – Map: County Series 1:2500 1881
Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, was a parliamentary constituency in England from 1295 to 1832. The constituency was on the site of what had been the original settlement of Salisbury, known as Old Sarum.
It was a so-called ‘rotten borough’ (or ‘pocket borough’) with an extremely small electorate that was consequently vastly over-represented and could be used by a patron to gain undue influence. Rotten boroughs were one of the curiosities of the British electoral system, where fathers passed on constituencies (and the power as an MP that went with this) to their sons as if they were personal property. In many such boroughs the very few electors could not vote for whom they truly wanted due to the lack of a secret ballot or simply due to the lack of a candidate desirable to their political philosophy. The term rotten borough came into use in the 18th century. The word “rotten” had the connotation of corruption as well as that of long-term decline.
Rotten boroughs had very few voters. For example, Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, only had three houses and a population of seven people. It was a possession of the Pitt family from the mid-17th century to 1802, and one of its Members of Parliament was Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder. In 1802 the Pitt family sold it for £60,000, even though the land and manorial rights were worth £700 a year at most.
Examples of rotten boroughs in 1831 include the following:
| Borough | Patron | MPs Returned | Houses in Borough | Voters in 1831 |
| Old Sarum, Wiltshire | Earl of Caledon | 2 | 3 | 7 |
| Gatton, Surrey | Sir Mark Wood | 2 | 23 | 7 |
| Bramber, West Sussex | Duke of Rutland | 2 | 35 | 20 |
| Newton, Isle of Wight | Sir Fitzwilliam Barrington | 2 | 14 | 23 |
| Dunwich, Suffolk | Lord Huntingfield | 2 | 44 | 32 |
With just a few individuals with the vote and no secret ballot, it was easy for candidates to buy their way to victory.
The constituency of Old Sarum was abolished under the Reform Act 1832
Indications of prehistoric settlement at Old Sarum have been discovered from as early as 3000 bc. An was erected around 400 bc, The site continued to be occupied during the Roman period. The Saxons took the British fort in the 6th century and later used it as a stronghold against marauding Vikings. Later the Normans constructed a motte and bailey castle, a stone curtain wall, and a great cathedral. A royal palace was built within the castle for King Henry I and was subsequently used by Plantagenet monarchs. This heyday of the settlement lasted for around 300 years. By the early 13th century the population had moved to New Sarum at the foot of the hill, now known as the cathedral city of Salisbury and the long neglected castle was finally abandoned by Edward II in 1322.
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Simply enter a postcode, or place name, follow the instruction and download your map in minutes.
On the 9th January 1816 Sir Humphry Davy first demonstrated the Davy Lamp.
Sir Humphry Davy (17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829), a chemist and inventor born in Penzance in Cornwall, tested his Davy safety lamp for miners at Hebburn Colliery. Three years later Davy was awarded a baronetcy, at the time the highest honour ever conferred on a man of science in Britain. In 1820 he became President of the Royal Society.
Davy’s lamp was made public at a Royal Society meeting in Newcastle, three years after the Felling mine disaster in 1812. Davy had discovered that a flame enclosed inside a fine mesh cannot ignite firedamp (a name given to a number of flammable gases, especially methane). The screen acts as a flame arrestor; air (and any firedamp present) can pass through the mesh freely enough to support combustion, but the holes are too fine to allow a flame to propagate through them and ignite any firedamp outside the mesh. If flammable gas mixtures were present, the flame of the Davy lamp burned higher with a blue tinge. Lamps were equipped with a metal gauge to measure the height of the flame. Miners could also place the safety lamp close to the ground to detect gases, such as carbon dioxide, that are denser than air and so could collect in depressions in the mine (black damp or chokedamp); if the mine air was oxygen-poor the lamp flame would go out.
Unfortunately the introduction of the Davy lamp led to an increase in mine accidents. Although the principle was perfectly sound the lamp encouraged the Mine owners to work mines and parts of mines that had previously been closed for safety reasons. A contributing factor to this rise in accidents was the unreliability of the lamps themselves. The bare gauze was easily damaged, and once just a single wire broke or rusted away, the lamp became a hazard in itself.
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.
Find out more about your area of the UK
150 years ago today on the 8th December 1864, the Clifton Suspension Bridge had its grand opening. The bridge spans the Avon Gorge and the River Avon, linking Clifton in Bristol to Leigh Woods in North Somerset. The bridge is built to a design by William Henry Barlow and John Hawkshaw, based on an earlier design by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
In 1753 Bristolian merchant William Vick had left a bequest in his will of £1,000 (equivalent to £130,000 in 2014), invested with instructions that when the interest had accumulated to £10,000 (£1,330,000), it should be used for the purpose of building a stone bridge between Clifton Down.
By 1829, Vick’s bequest had reached £8,000, but it was estimated that a stone bridge would cost over ten times that. A competion was held to find a design, but all the designs, including a final one by Thomas Telford failed to gain aproval because of either looks or cost.
An Act of Parliament was then passed to allow a wrought iron suspension bridge to be built instead of stone, and tolls levied to recoup the cost. In 1831 a second competition was held with new judges. The winner was declared to be a design by Smith and Hawkes of the Eagle Foundry in Birmingham. Brunel then had a personal meeting and persuaded him to change the decision, The committee then declared Brunel the winner and he was awarded a contract as project engineer with his design being finalised by William Henry Barlow and John Hawkshaw . The winning design was for a suspension bridge.
Folklore says that a rope was taken across the gorge by kite, or even by bow and arrow! The simple and much more likely event was that common hemp ropes were taken down the side of the gorge, across the river by boat and pulled up the other side.
The towers are built principally of local Pennant stone. The chains and suspension rods are made of wrought iron with the chains anchored in tapering tunnels, 25 metres (82 ft) long, on either side of the bridge. After completion of the chains, vertical suspension rods were hung from the links in the chains and large girders hung from these. The girders on either side then support the deck, which is 3 feet higher at the Clifton end than at Leigh Wood. The construction work was completed in 1864 — 111 years after a bridge at the site was first planned.
to buy this map or maps of your area go to Cassini Maps
Cassini – Old Parish Maps
RRP £12.99 Introductory offer – Now only £4.99
Offer ends 31/10/2014
(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.
Situated amid the East Kent marshes Richborough is perhaps the most symbolically important of Roman sites in Britain. It is thought by many that the four invading Legions under Aulus Plautius assembled in Richborough after landing in Britain during the Claudian Invasion of A.D. 43.
Fast forward nearly 1900 years and troops were heading back into Europe. In January 1916 during the height of WWI, it was decided to develop Richborough as a depot and base for inland water transport to service the troops. At this time Richborough consisted of a short length of quay suitable for barges, and one solitary dwelling house.
By 1918, the enormous feat had been completed of transforming Richborough into a large and well- equipped seaport, of 2,000 acres, complete with all services and capable of handling 30,000 tons of traffic per week. 2,300 ft of new wharf was built for the cross-channel barge service, in which, at the end of the war, 242 barges were employed, including ten of 1,000 ton capacity.
Among the new ports features was what we we today call a “roll-on, roll-off” ferry – for railway trains. Among the many tons moved from Richborough were complete trains carrying tanks, direct from the factories to the British army on the front line. The use of train-ferries greatly reduced the amount of labour required in the transport of these items. It took only 30 to 40 minutes to load or unload the 54 railway wagons and fifty or sixty motor vehicles that could be carried by these train-ferries. An analysis done at the time found that to transport 1,000 tons of war material from the point of manufacture to the front by conventional shipping means involved the use of 1,500 labourers, whereas when using train-ferries that number decreased to around 100 labourers.
So well camouflaged was the port, that it became known as the Mystery Harbour. All port buildings were one-story, their walls and roofs were painted to match the general background of a low-lying area. 
The military secret was so strictly and carefully observed by the British, that the existence of the port had been unknown to the Germans during the whole war; the port was often overflown by the aircraft heading to drop bombs on London, where the bombs were striking civilians, but no bombs were ever dropped on Richborough.
After the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, train ferries were used extensively for the return of material from the Front. Indeed according to war office statistics, a greater tonnage of material was transported by train ferry at Richborough in 1919 than in 1918. The returning train ferries had space for motor transport as well as railway rolling stock, thousands of lorries, motor cars and “B Type” buses also returned via this route. It’s a little known fact that buses transported troops to and from the Front Line and were put to use as ambulances and even mobile pigeon lofts. Nearly 1,200 London General Omnibus Company vehicles went on war service, most to France and Belgium, with some travelling as far afield as Egypt.
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.
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.
Cassini Maps is offering 30% Off all maps on their www.cassinimaps.co.uk website
Personalised historical Maps are available from 1805 to the 1940’s.
Whether you are tracing the history of your family or just interested in the local history of the area where you live, reliable conclusions are based on quality sources and Cassini historical maps have an important part to play in discovering where and how your ancestors lived.
Cassini Maps also make diverting, decorative and practical presents for anyone with any interest in the past. For weddings, anniversaries, birthdays or Christmas; for your friends, your relatives – or even for yourself. Ideal as business gifts centred on your company location.
To get 30% of all maps from Cassini simply enter the code: C-APRIL-30 when prompted during the checkout process.
P&P applies as normal. Offer available until the 3rd May 2013.
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