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Friday 14 December 2018

Scottish National Library map resource




Sadly, Where's the Path is discontinuing, after providing a fantastic service for people hunting for locations.  Apparently they can no longer afford the fees charged by Google for the provision of satellite imagery.  They always had problems with the OS too, being allowed only so much customer usage per day for copyright materials.

But the Scottish National Library rides to the rescue.  They are now providing a very similar service for free, using old OS maps (up to 6" scale) on the left and Bing / Microsoft satellite  imagery on the right.  It works well, as far as I can see -- and gives a grid reference for wherever the cursor happens to be.

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=10.993333333333334&lat=51.1888&lon=-2.8079&layers=161&right=BingHyb 

I have already used it quite a bit.

5 comments:

Alex Gee said...

Very interesting shading/shape on the site of the Bleadon Hill gravels. perhaps the deposit was much more extensive? or is now?

Dave Maynard said...

Wow, what an amazing resource, I will make a lot of use of it in future.

Up to now, I've had to make a placemark in Google Earth, export it, open in my GIS and then convert the projection to UK grid.

Dave

Dave Maynard said...

Alex,
If you loook at Google Earth, for this location, the current view is from June 27 this year, so in a very droughty period. There are lots of parchmarks just to the north that look like they could be fluvial channels in gravel. They also appear on earlier images.

There are many features visisble here, including some of human origin, but it is difficult to be sure what is going on. My eye was drawn to ST349573 on the Scottish mapping, with strange circular patches that looked geological, but the Google Earth image shows pretty convincingly that this is the result of differential horse grazing. Pony-culture looks well established on this hillside.

Dave

Alex Gee said...

Dave: I had a wander up there the other week and Brian did a post on it. The map makes me think I might have another wander tomorrow! Satellite imagery is ok, but I've come to the conclusion that too many opinions on this subject and blog, are informed by study in the library, rather than examination on the ground! As the old saying goes "you can't tell until you rub your nose in it".

BRIAN JOHN said...

Another thing I forgot to mention. If you really want to scrutinise an area in detail, you can hop over to the BGS "Geology Viewer" and look at solid and surface sedimentary geology at whatever scale you choose. And there is also a tab that allows you to see all of the thousands of borehole locations, once you zoom in to a large scale. The borehole logs should be revealed when you click on a borehole site -- but the records are of mixed value. Many of the logs are confidential, so you can't get at them -- and many of the others are related to drilling for water -- so even if you can see a full stratigraphic sequence on a log, the sediment descriptions are so vague as to be effectively useless! But every now and then you find something useful........