Martin Briscoe wrote:
I can't get past the initial
selection of the town in Firefox.
If anyone is having similar trouble with the revamped Old-Maps website, after a fair bit
of trial and error I found the following works for me using MS Explorer 6:
Figure out where the area you want to look at is relative to the nearest town in terms of
kilometres (Kms) to the east or west and to the north or south (If you think in miles,
just multiply your distances in miles by 1.6 to get the figures into Km). Call Kms to the
west minus and Kms to the south minus. Multiply these figures by 1000 to get the relative
distances in metres. So for an area that is 4 Kms to the west of the nearest town and 2
1/2 Kms to the north, the figures are -4000 and +2500. These are the easting (distance
eastward) and northing (distance northward) difference figures respectively.
Enter the name of the nearest town in the 'Search' box and click the 'Go'
button next to it.
When the small map of the town comes up, write down the two six figure numbers that come
up in the co-ordinates boxes. The left hand number is the position of the centre (I think)
of the map covering the town in metres east of the UK national grid origin point and the
right hand figure is the position in metres north of the origin point.
To the left hand number add or subtract your easting difference figure and do the same
with your northing difference figure to the number in the right hand box. The two figures
you now have are the easting and northing grid co-ordinates for the map of the area you
want to look at.
The next bit was tricky and may behave differently in different browsers. I found that
once a search had been done on either an address or grid co-ordinates, the numbers that
appeared in the grid co-ordinates boxes couldn't be changed, so in order to enter the
new co-ordinates, I needed to start with a completely clear search line. If you click on
the 'Maps' tab at the top of the page, it should give you this clear search line.
Once you have completely empty co-ordinate boxes, enter the co-ordinates for the area you
want to look at, eastings in the left hand box and northings in the right hand box. Click
the 'Go' button next to the co-ordinates and it should give you the small map you
are looking for. Once you have that, click the 'Enlarge' button to the right of
the small map and you should get the full page map (provided, that is, that you have
heeded John Ball's advice and enabled pop-ups from the Old-Maps site! - thank you
John)
The position that you end up in isn't continuously variable, it selects the nearest
available preset position to the co-ordinates given. The preset positions are about
one-fifth of the large map size apart.
As a rough rule of thumb, the full page 1:10,560 maps are about 2 Km east-west by 1.4 Km
north-south. So to move just less than one large map width east add 1700 to the left hand
(easting) co-ordinate or to move just less than one map to the north add 1300 to the right
hand (northing) co-ordinate. To move west or south subtract the corresponding figures.
This sounds complicated, but once you've done it a couple of times you'll probably
find it a lot easier than moving across country by loading successive small maps,
particularly if you had hill farmer ancestors like mine who never lived anywhere near a
town. It also saves moving bits across the world unneccessarily - and as each unnesseccary
bit produces a minute amount of unneccessary greenhouse gas each time it passes through a
server on its way to you, that has to be a good thing. (Pity some website designers
don't think of that!)
If anyone finds any easier ways to get around the Old-Maps site - please share them.
Regards
Dave Matthews
Corlette, Australia