Over the years my maps have been of great use to professional and local historians as well as farmers and others who are interested in the history of the landscape around their properties.

The A1 research maps were intended to make the sources more accessible. The main sources are the tithe surveys which were made after an Act of Parliament of 1836 which called for a settled apportionment of tithe payments to the Church or lay impropriators. Some places do not have tithe surveys,  for example in the Cotswold area of  Gloucestershire, where the tithe payments had been sorted out in their enclosure awards. For these parishes enclosure and estate maps have been used where possible, though these by no means give complete coverage.

The research maps have been painstakingly redrawn at a common scale of 6 inchs to 1 mile from work on the original tithe and other maps. The original maps can be extremely big (sometimes too big for the searchrooms) and were sometimes in too delicate a state to be used too often. My research maps have had information from the apportionments (land use, field names, description of buildings etc.) added on to them and are supplied with lists of landowners which can be matched to the map reference numbers. The A1 research maps can cover one large parish or combine a number of smaller ones, together with detached parts of other parishes which in some areas are extremely complicated and difficult to understand on their own.

The research makes possible (where the sources are full enough) the production of hand drawn coloured decorative maps both of parishes or townships or as “ovals” centred on a particular site at slightly larger scales. These bring out features that are not obvious from the research maps and have proved popular with customers for framing and display. Smaller prints and cards of these maps are also available once they have been commissioned but the full size ones are reserved for the original customer.