Caudwell Farm - William Mudway c.1750's (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 23:34 (4735 days ago) @ unknown

Hi Ray,
this is the best site in my opinion for looking at old Ordnance Survey Maps. I've set this link to (hopefully!) take you directly to a "homepage" for Clearwell. (Sorry but this site doesn't "like" direct hyperlinks).

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=21374&st=CLEARWELL

If you then click onto the map it should enlarge and you can see Caudwell Farm marked just west of Clearwell Castle. Once you take a few minutes to master it this site is excellent. For example, to the left of the map there's a menu of many other OS Maps thro the ages, some offer far more national coverage and are in bigger scale than others. For your purpose probably the First Series Map is best, its in B & W but has huge amounts of detail. "Caudwell" is conveniently marked for you just above the red British Museum stamp !. Whether we can assume Caudwell wasn't a Farm at this time is debatable. Once you've opened a map you can use the mouse cursor to navigate around it and zoom in & out etc. Below the map you can see the exact date, for this B&W First Series Map Sheet 35 is from 1831. Unfortunately the next Dean map on this site isnt until 1945 when it's marked "Caudwell Farm".

One thing you may notice when using differing Issues (or Series) of these maps is that even "official" Government documents such as these are also subject to variations of spelling of placenames thro time, presumably as those compiling the data on the ground relied on local people for such information rather than some national database as they would nowadays.

Another good site for Old Maps is
http://www.old-maps.co.uk/maps.html
Unfortunately this site means you must enter your destination into its search engine for it to then load the appropriate map; unlike the OS site you can not move across the maps so easily by mouse. Also this site doesn't recognise "our" Clearwell in its search engine, so enter "Clearwell Caves" or similar. (It doesn't recognise Caudwell). This lets you eventually find a very large scale 1881 map showing "Caudwell Farm", next to an "old limekiln"... Using the righthand menu you can also load other maps post1881 of varying scales.

Finally, not sure if you gents know, but if you want to exchange any personal details such as photos you can best do this by clicking on the recipient's user name, or envelope icon, on their forum posts. This lets you send private mails straight into their email inbox without them needing to be on the forum website at all.
Hope this helps and hope your health improves soon !