Has the UK moved for you?

[epsilonGreedy]

This morning I had a lengthy conversation with a County Council highways officer about a daft dispute with elderly neighbours who have decided to thin my boundary hedge which involves them crossing the road from their house opposite. He was able to consult his maps to confirm the public road verge is 1.1m wide from the tarmac, then he described the complicated history of road highway mapping in the UK including a country wide correction instigated by Ordnance Survey.

 

Apparently OS decided the whole of the UK was misplaced by 1m(metre) on a north/south axis but not all county highways maps have been updated to reflect this 1m shift.

 

Edited September 24, 2019 by epsilonGreedy

[Oldsteel]

Is it April 1st?

[ProDave]

Is this why google maps has shifted our postcode "pin" about 1/4 mile to the west, so it is now in the middle of a field?

[epsilonGreedy]

8 minutes ago, Oldsteel said:

Is it April 1st?

 

 

1m as in 1 metre.

 

A single meter can be important when an angry septuagenarian is conducting a multi year protest against your planning permission through boundary incursions.

[Conor]

34 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

This morning I had a lengthy conversation with a County Council highways officer about a daft dispute with elderly neighbours who have decided to thin my boundary hedge which involves them crossing the road from their house opposite. He was able to consult his maps to confirm the public road verge is 1.1m wide from the tarmac, then he described the complicated history of road highway mapping in the UK including a country wide correction instigated by Ordinance Survey.

 

Apparently OS decided the whole of the UK was misplaced by 1m on a north/south axis but not all county highways maps have been updated to reflect this 1m shift.

 

 

Yes. This was the bane of our lives when doing GPS surveys. I remember one survey of a new watermain along a coastal road... The map shift was so bad, our watermain appeared to be in the sea!

 

The reason for all this is that the original OS/OSI/OSNI maps were based on fixed trig points that were setout manually, decades ago. Along comes GPS, with millimetre precision, and the little errors in the base mapping became apparent. Errors got worse the further away from the control Points you got. In Co. Fermanagh, it was not unusual to get map shift of a couple metres or more.

 

Over the last few years, there have been big projects by various mapping companies to correct the old maps to the "correct" positions. 

 

If you ever have a boundary dispute, using GPS to verify boundaries that were mapped 100 years ago can be problematic...

[Temp]

1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

elderly neighbours who have decided to thin my boundary hedge which involves them crossing the road from their house opposite.

 

They aren't 1m out...they are on the wrong planet.

[SteamyTea]

Tides where set from Newlyn, that is where we get heights from (until GPS came along).

Where is the main datum for the UK?

Earth moves quite often down here when a mine collapses, or the geothermal boys in St. Day and Penzance are fracking.

Also, twice a day, the coast moves quite a bit, and that is before the cliffs collapse.

[epsilonGreedy]

7 minutes ago, Temp said:

They aren't 1m out...they are on the wrong planet.

 

 

It has been a new and interesting experience for me. Prior to buying this plot my most contentious neighbourly dispute occurred when someone refused to pay a full 50% of the cost of a fence repair.

 

The elderly ones believe the council has authorized them to prune my hedge which apparently I do not own because the village owns it. They cannot identify the council official though apparently his is nearly 7ft tall. Trying to establish the council's official position on this matter has involved speaking to multiple officers at the district and country level. They are generous with their time on the phone but nothing definitive apart from the country highways chap who said we would not intervene unless there was a distinct hedge overhang above the tarmacked road. I routinely snip the hedge back in the summer out of concern a stray bramble might injure a cyclist and I want to avoid a 3rd party claim on my self built site insurance.

[Ed Davies]

1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

Apparently OS decided the whole of the UK was misplaced by 1m(metre) on a north/south axis but not all county highways maps have been updated to reflect this 1m shift.

 

I think that statement must be a result of some confusion somewhere along the line. It's a few years since I've been involved with this stuff but I have done mapping software working directly with OS [¹] people and data (in the late 1990s) and then (early 2000s)  on more general geodetic software (for the aviation industry) where the partner company was a consultancy separately involved in the update to the British Grid Reference system.

 

From the 1930s until about 2000 (I think it was) the OS grid was based on the Airy ellipsoid. The positions of various main trig points were determined (with sextants, etc) then other secondary trig points and actual points on the ground were derived by triangulation assuming a particular shape for the Earth (or, at least, the Earth's gravitational field). This was a pain because positions were not well defined with respect to GPS surveying which everybody used - things could be a metre or so out of position and the GB is moving, along with most of the rest of NW Europe, at a small but not completely insignificant rate (25 mm/year in a NE direction, IIRC) relative to the ITRF (International Terrestrial Reference Frame) which is linked to the WGS84 ellipsoid that GPS uses.

 

Consequently, around 2000 the OS grid was redefined as being relative to the ETRF (European Terrestrial Reference Frame) which is a simple, but time dependent to allow for continental drift, transformation from ITRF. To allow for differences in the ellipsoids used and the errors in the old survey networks a separate correction is applied (OSTN - Ordnance Survey Transformation Network) to get the actual grid positions. It uses quite a big table to derive the correction for any given point as the errors involved are not uniform.

 

I can believe that this has resulted in grid shifts of up to about 1 metre in some parts of the island, the old OS Grid was only defined to about that level of accuracy anyway. I very much doubt that there's been a systematic shift of 1 metre across the whole country.

 

[¹] BTW, it's the Ordnance Survey, meaning guns, etc, not Ordinance Survey meaning by-laws. It was set up to provide the army with good maps of their own country for fighting Jacobites and potential invasions by Napoleon. What's usually referred to as the OS is for Great Britain only so doesn't interest itself in the “whole of the UK” - there is/was a separate OSNI.

Edited September 23, 2019 by Ed Davies

[Jeremy Harris]

The topic of ownership of land, hedges etc is one that has been vexing our Parish Council for some time, following some serious flooding caused, in part, by a riparian owner not undertaking their duty to keep their part of the stream clear from obstructions.  The land in question was a strip alongside a lane, with an overgrown hedge, full of alder and willow, that had partially grown into the stream. 

 

First off, Parish Councils and villages rarely, if ever, own land, and almost always never alongside highways.  They may look after land in trust (for example a gifted village hall or some such), but the land almost always belongs to either a defined owner, private or commercial, or the County Council/Unitary Authority.  Almost all verges that are maintained by the council highways department are owned by the County Council/Unitary Authority, and as such are a part of the highway.

 

Often the council highways department won't have definitive records as to what does belong to them and what doesn't.  Sometimes this vagueness can arise from something as simple as a request to cut a verge.  In the dim and distant past, before we owned our plot, and when it was badly overgrown, the Parish Council submitted a request to the County Council (as it was then) that the verge in front of our house should be included in the programme of verge cutting carried out by the Council's contractors.  When we fenced this off at the start of our build there was a bit of an issue with the contractor telling the council that this section of verge was no longer accessible.  It took several phone calls to resolve, but finally a letter was found from the Parish Council requesting that the County Council keep this verge cut, but acknowledging that the owner of the land had not responded to requests from them (not surprising, he was a virtual recluse).  I then managed to get the Unitary Authority highways department to remove our bit of land from their verge cutting schedule (although they have started cutting it again now, for some reason).

 

I suspect that the elderly neighbour may well recall some informal agreement from the past relating to keeping this area cut, and is now using that recollection to make a point.  I doubt that what he says is correct, but suspect that it may well be a real struggle to determine exactly who owns what and what rights there may be over it, as often it seems these get lost in the mists of time (record keeping does not seem to be a local authority strong point when it comes to things like this, it seems).

 

 

[Temp]

Perhaps put out on the grape vine you are considering replacing it with a fence because a prowler was seen leaving through a gap and crossing the road.

[Jeremy Harris]

5 minutes ago, Temp said:

Perhaps put out on the grape vine you are considering replacing it with a fence because a prowler was seen leaving through a gap and crossing the road.

 

 

Damned good idea!

 

It's usually OK to erect a fence up to (I think) 1.8m high, as long as it doesn't obstruct a sight line.

[Temp]

Presumably anyone cutting a hedge on behalf of the PC or authorized by the PC should be covered by the PC's Public Liability Insurance policy? And suitably qualified to prune trees? 

 

Be careful if you raise this issue as they may decide to stop you cutting it as well for same reason.

[Temp]

23 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

Damned good idea!

 

It's usually OK to erect a fence up to (I think) 1.8m high, as long as it doesn't obstruct a sight line.

1m adjacent to a highway unless you get PP. 2m elsewhere.

[Jeremy Harris]

23 minutes ago, Temp said:

Presumably anyone cutting a hedge on behalf of the PC or authorized by the PC should be covered by the PC's Public Liability Insurance policy? And suitably qualified to prune trees? 

 

Be careful if you raise this issue as they may decide to stop you cutting it as well for same reason.

 

 

Yes, although our Local Authority Councillor repeatedly states that this is not the case (she's wrong, as it happens).  Living in a rural area, with narrow single track lanes, overgrown hedgerows are a constant agenda item at Parish Council meetings, and we have a standard notice in the Parish magazine every month reminding people of their obligation to keep their hedges trimmed, where they may obstruct lanes, or visibility (this is universally ignored, though). 

 

Before we had access to the (excellent) Wiltshire Council Parish Steward scheme (a means by which Parish Councils can directly instruct a contractor employed by the council to do odd jobs) we had to use contractors for tasks like maintaining the playing field, playground and communal areas that were on an approved list, which meant, in part, that they had provided evidence to the council that they held the appropriate level of indemnity cover. 

 

In addition, anyone doing tasks that involved working on the highway, like painting the numerous bridge railings we have (for some reason our stream meanders back and forth under the lane in a few places) had to demonstrate that they held the additional cover (and, I think, level of competence, safety signage etc) necessary for working on the highway. 

 

I can get chapter and verse on this tomorrow evening, as by coincidence this is an agenda item at tomorrow's PC meeting, and one of my colleagues has been researching it in depth, to see where we stand when getting some of our footpaths repaired by some local volunteers.

[epsilonGreedy]

22 hours ago, JSHarris said:

First off, Parish Councils and villages rarely, if ever, own land, and almost always never alongside highways.  They may look after land in trust (for example a gifted village hall or some such), but the land almost always belongs to either a defined owner, private or commercial, or the County Council/Unitary Authority.  Almost all verges that are maintained by the council highways department are owned by the County Council/Unitary Authority, and as such are a part of the highway.

 

 

I think the elderly neighbours have arbitrarily decided they morally own the road verge & hedge on my side of the public road because they have been mowing and pruning it to their own preference for some years before I purchased the plot.

 

The County level highways officer confirmed from his maps that ownership is straight forward, the country owns 1.1m of verge then its my plot. He also mentioned the often quoted 1m verge rule is just hearsay, it can vary a lot and will be determined from their maps when there is a dispute.

 

The main challenge is how to communicate these essential facts to the hard-of-thinking living opposite. The underlying issue is they are still spitting feathers over the original planning decision 3.5 years ago which they consider the greatest act of Government malfeasance since the Crown beheaded Mary Queen of Scots.

[epsilonGreedy]

On 23/09/2019 at 15:53, Ed Davies said:

... things could be a metre or so out of position and the GB is moving, along with most of the rest of NW Europe, at a small but not completely insignificant rate (25 mm/year in a NE direction, IIRC) relative to the ITRF (International Terrestrial Reference Frame) which is linked to the WGS84 ellipsoid that GPS uses.

 

 

When it comes to hedge disputes in old villages, 25mm a year is significant.

 

Thanks for the full explanation, the county highways officer must have doubted my ability to comprehend the unabridged explanation.

Edited September 24, 2019 by epsilonGreedy