ment reorganisation of 1974, as they were the ones obtaining (with only
minor boundary adjustments) throughout all but a tiny part of the period to
which the records in the following pages relate. Note that the -shire ending
was at one time borne by some English counties, such as Devon and Dorset,
but latterly fell into disuse. Though the Irish county boundaries also under-
went numerous adjustments in 1898, none of those was sizeable enough to
have affected the assignment of the records in this book. An exception has had
to be allowed for certain records from the Lake District and its environs that
have failed to distinguish between the different components of Cumberland,
Westmorland and the isolated part of Lancashire sometimes distinguished as
Furness; for these, the post-1974 ‘Cumbria’ has had to do duty instead. Excep-
tions have also been made for (i) island groups, such as Scilly, that enjoy a dis-
tinctiveness even though formally part of a county and (ii) individual islands
of the far-extending Hebrides in view of the great differences in size and loca-
tion of these.
‘The border’ in Irish contexts refers to the political line separating the six
counties constituting the U.K. portion of the province of Ulster from the Irish
Republic. ‘The Borders’ is a vague term for the physical borderland between
England and Scotland. East Anglia is a collective term for the counties of Nor-
folk and Suffolk only, an area broadly coterminous with the one-time Anglo-
Saxon kingdom of this name, strictly speaking, but commonly used in a
vaguer and broader sense. Eastern Counties is East Anglia in the strict sense
plus the several counties immediately to the west and south of those. Gallo-
way is a collective term for Wigtownshire and Kirkcudbrightshire. South
Wales refers to the southernmost Welsh counties of Monmouthshire (now
Gwent), Glamorganshire and Carmarthenshire. For records regarded as lack-
ing that specificity, the vaguer ‘southern Wales’ has been used.
Some records exist just for a city or for a well-marked topographical
region, such as the Fens of East Anglia, that cannot be identified with one
county alone, and there is no alternative but to repeat those designations.
Particularly regrettable is the use of an undifferentiated ‘Highlands’ for a large
proportion of the records from the vast northern half of Scotland, a term
which may or may not embrace the Inner and Outer Hebrides (alias the
Western Isles) as well. More vaguely still, ‘the north [of Britain]’ may be all
that one is told; but that is thankfully rare.
To save space, the ‘Co.’ conventionally employed before the names of
many Irish counties has been omitted, except in the case of Co. Dublin, in
order to avoid confusion with Dublin city.
32 Geographical Areas