Welsh Journals

THE MAKING AND MAPPING OF THE PARISH: THE CORNISH EXPERIENCE. WILLIAM RAVENHILL Ravenhill, William. 1985: The Making and Mapping of the Parish: The Cornish Experience. Cambria, Vol. 12(1) pp. 55 to pp. 72. Part I of: Davies, W.K.D. (ed) Human Geography from Wales: Proceedings of E.G. Bowen Memorial Conference. ISSN 0306-9796. The evolution of the parish as a basic unit of British local government had a complex history, particularly in the Celtic West. Moreover, the difficulty of obtaining precise information on so many complicated areal forms meant that accurate maps of parishes at the county level were difficult to produce. Not until the last decade of the seventeenth century did the first complete parish map of an English county appear through the pioneering work of Joel Gascoyne in Cornwall. William Ravenhill, Dept. of Geography, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Exeter, England, EX4 4RJ. The parcelling up of the land surface within a state or country for internal administrative purposes is an important theme in the spatial organization of most societies (Massam 1975). Of considerable interest within this general context is the particular form of territorial division which emerged in christianised Western Europe, known to us as the parish. This spatial unit became almost ubiquitous in medieval England and persisted for several centuries as a framework within which a number of different social and administrative services was provided and a variety of functions performed. In the course of time the definition of parish boundaries and their recording, at first in memory and later in cartographic form, became essential. This mapping of a lengthy linear feature, frequently, but by no means always visually defined, presented a formidable problem and its solution was long delayed. This was so for many reasons, some of which reflect the interesting way in which the parochial system came into being, while others mirror the form in which it matured in terms of man on the land with God. To give an authoritative yet succinct account of the origin of the parish and its use as a spatial unit of ecclesiastical and later secular organisation is fraught with difficulty. To many of the questions that need to be asked about the parish, what facts there are present confused and uncertain answers, for as far as can be ascertained, the division of England into parishes was determined by no statute, no decree nor authoritative commision. In respect of some of its most important features, such as the particular ones in which geographers are interested for example, its area and boundaries there appears to be no