Watsonian Vice County Boundaries
The Watsonian Vice County Boundaries are available as digital boundaries for use within GIS systems completely free of charge.
About
The Vice County system for Great Britain was devised by an English botanist, Hewett Cottrell Watson, for the purposes of illustrating plant distributions These digitised boundaries are available free-of-charge as a download to recorders, mapping scheme organisers, local record centres and others. Because the boundaries are at a scale of 1:10,000 a GIS system such as MapInfo is needed to view the boundaries against suitable map backgrounds although the boundaries can also be loaded and viewed in Recorder and it is hoped that Dmap versions will also become available.
Read the full metadata for the Vice County Boundaries
Licence
The Watsonian Vice County Boundaries can be used within the terms of the OS Open Data Licence. This can be found on the OS website
Download
Continue to download page
Issues
It has been brought to our attention that several Vice-counties do not have correct geometries. These are:
-
28 West Norfolk: the geometry crosses itself near Blakeney (TG 014 345).
-
36 Herefordshire
-
40 Shropshire
-
47 Montgomeryshire
-
105 West Ross and Cromarty: island off Loch Broom (Isle Martin) turned inside out (NH 098 992)
-
110 Outer Hebrides: geometry crosses itself on N shore of Eriskay (NF 791 121).
-
111 Orkney: Island S of Sanday geometry not closed (HY 662 373.
-
112 Zetland:land and sea interchanged on W coast of Yell (HP 477 050)
We hope to resolve these issues in the next few months, as soon as the new NBN Gateway is fully operational.