Sunday, October 15, 2017

Railway poster for a forgotten county

Embed from Getty Images

Reviewing Engel's England, I concluded:
Local boundaries have been rubbed out or redrawn in a way that would be simply unthinkable in the more federal United States. My jigsaw, for instance, can be dated to between 1965, when Huntingdonshire absorbed the Soke of Peterborough, and 1974, when it was itself absorbed into Cambridgeshire. 
Some counties have resisted their erasure from history, notably Yorkshire (the largest) and Rutland (the smallest). Elsewhere Berkshire is fading from memory and no one seems to have heard of Huntingdonshire at all. 
Soon it will be as lost as the Cotswold county of Winchcombeshire from the 10th and 11th centuries.

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