Sunday 21 August 2011

New roads and a castle

As the coverage of OSM improves, it is harder and harder to find roads other than small residential ones in East Yorkshire that are not in the database at all, but we found one today. It's always satisfying to see the red trace extending across the GPS in open space, showing it's a new trace.

We went to Skipsea, just south of Bridlington to see what was missing, quite a lot as it turns out. The previous mapper (tracer?) had used unclassified for residential roads, there were no road names, amenities like the pub, church, shop and school were all missing as well as most of the small residential roads, but of course it looked complete at a glance.


On the outskirts of Skipsea is a Norman church, All Saints. It was built fairly soon after the Norman conquest along with Skipsea Castle. The castle was a classic motte and bailey affair and all that remains today is the mound, now operated by English Heritage. The castle was built by 1086 but demolished on the orders of Henry VIII. Next time we're there I'm going to walk to the mound and take a closer look.

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