I'm currently (slowly) working through a history degree in my spare time, but I'm also working on a few topics of my own. My latest is an exercise in landscape archaeology. In case you don't know what that is, and if you don't watch Time Team you probably don't get much exposure to it, it's looking at bumps in the ground to see what was there without digging holes. Oh, and maps are involved too, which is the part that I've been working on for the last few days.
The subject of my reseach is something called "Odiham Race Course", which is a race track that used to exist near Odiham, which is a village in Hampshire in the UK. It sits just off the M3 which is a major motorway out of London, but more of that in a bit. The race course was in use from 1760-1875 as far as any references I can find mention, which means that it went out of use a century before I was born. This means that there is nothing of it left on the ground, but since most of it was likely to be a path over a heath there's probably not much left to see anyway. My challenge is to find some evidence of it and record it on this site somewhere. What's more I have considerably more time than just 3 days to do it.
The first stage was finding the damn thing. Having roamed all over the surrounding woods and fields when I was a kid I don't remember having seen much at all that looked like a race track, but old maps from when it was in use would show me the location. Looking at the available OS maps for the area the oldest ones that I can find actually show it and so I've spent a few days taking these old maps and putting them into Photoshop. I few layers later and the addition of up to date maps and a layer mask resulted in the location being displayed against the modern landmarks. First of all I'll give the Google Maps link for the location as this will allow anybody who wants to know where exactly this is to see. Yes, the course is centered around what is now Junction 5 of the M3 motorway. Apparently this is called progress. Of course the race course was destroyed nearly a century before the motorway was built so it's a pure coincidence that it's there, and feel free to zoom out if you want to know where I'm talking about in relation to the rest of the world. Anybody who wants real history should scroll down south slightly and look where the river seems to split (again, google maps is rubbish and that's actually a river going underneath a canal). At that point is a castle, but it's fenced off while they wait for lottery money to stop it falling down. More on that at a later date.
Now that we've got Google out the way it's time to start breaking some copyright laws and show the map that I've produced that shows the location of the course compared to the modern maps. It's a simple layer mask allowing an old map to show through to a new map so excuse the roughness.
You can see how that relates to the Google map quite easily, although it does point out that Google maps doesn't tell the difference between "Road" and "Footpath through the woods" in places and so I wouldn't want to navigate by it. There's a couple of interesting points on the map, the first being that the northern most point is now the line taken by some power lines. That point isn't following a contour so it's probably a coincidence but as far as I can tell the line is spot on. The second point is that the bottom left of the track actually follows a path that still exists through the woods. Back then the woods stopped on the western edge of the course and on the right was heathland. One thing I can do is to look at the ages of the trees on each side of that track to see if it's obvious that some are older than others, but the woods have had a century to grow and are quite established now.
The real key is, I belive, the woods where the word "Odiham" is. I've always wondered about the bumps in those woods and it's pure coincidence that I now have a feature that runs through the middle of them. In fact they're part of the reason I got interested in the subject in the first place and so to have the possibility of them being something is quite exciting. Of course the danger is I'll see them as what I know was nearby, and not what they actually are but that's the skill I'm trying to cultivate.
So far I've learnt quite a lot. I've learnt that Photoshop is the best piece of analysis software ever written. I've also learnt that old maps (these are dated from 1849-1899) can be shockingly accurate when overlayed with modern maps with features being mere meters out, but you can't always trust a map to be accurate for whole features such as roads. Next up comes walking through woods trying to find anything that may indicate the location of the course. I don't know what it looked like, and there may never have been anything except for flags in the ground for all I know. The entire area is now wooded so I'm relying on there having been earthworks of some kind. The fact that I've identified part of the course that's still a footpath today is more than I hoped to ever achieve, and it makes me hopeful that over 100 years of racing has left a mark on the landscape that I can still see. It's just a pity that during the winter those woods flood so much (bet they didn't when they were heathland) as it's going to make looking quite hard for the next few months.
If google does its stuff then I should get quite high up for searches for "Odiham Race Course". I just hope that by having this map I can help some people out as I can't find any other maps of the thing on the free side of the internet. Now, I must organise a license for showing OS maps on my site before they come and kill me, but if anybody wants the source PSD that allows fading between the old and new maps then send me a message (link on the left) and I'll pass one your way. Odds are you have to live around here to care though.
posted @ Thursday, January 12, 2006 11:14 PM