Britain's Highest Mountains

[Bielzebub1981]

According to wikipedia entry List_of_mountains_and_hills_of_the_United_Kingdom

Highest mountains in Scotland show heights in feet AND metres


Highest mountains in Wales, England and Northern Ireland ONLY shows their heights and relative heights in metres


Discuss ?

[jimbob]

No discussion required. Convert to feet,  and post a revision with said number of feet to Wikipedia.  The number will be moderated according to their rules and hey presto those numbers will appear on Wikipedia.

Now it only remains for you to do it.

[vizzavona]

  There will possibly be folks around that will be asking the O.S. and all other map producers to alter their maps to the old British system for heights and distance....although our O.S. maps have always used the metric system....easier to work with. :-)

[jimbob]

   our O.S. maps have always used the metric system....easier to work with. :-)

When is the last time people in our schools were taught in the Imperial systems , I bet you ten groats it were decades ago.

[BuzyG]

When is the last time people in our schools were taught in the Imperial systems , I bet you ten groats it were decades ago.

That would be when I was at school.


Hang on I have my Zeus tables in my desk draw.

[Percy]

although our O.S. maps have always used the metric system....easier to work with. :-)

Not true. The OS were publishing Imperial system maps as late as the 1960s. I’ve got a bunch of the inch to a mile maps. There’s a particularly beautiful Lake District tourist map from 1966, worth seeking out on ebay. The OS was founded in 1791, two years before the metre even existed so they certainly weren’t metric back then.

[vizzavona]

Yes, this is true we all used these maps with distances in miles and the contours were shown in feet but the maps were all based on a metric grid system....i.e. the grid squares were on the the 1:63,360 maps, that we all used then, but the squares were 1.6cms for each Kilometer. The entire system for the military mapping of the country was metric.  Maybe this happens when a Frenchman was asked to do the Mapping of our island.
It could have been that maybe many folks were turned off using maps on account of this quite muddling set-up and I would have thought for pupils in school trying to get into map reading?
Much clearer now with the equivalent map today the 1:50,000 map...most used now?...has a grid square of 2 cms for each kilometer. Why would anyone want to convert this back into the old imperial system.

[Percy]

Yes, this is true we all used these maps with distances in miles and the contours were shown in feet but the maps were all based on a metric grid system....i.e. the grid squares were on the the 1:63,360 maps, that we all used then, but the squares were 1.6cms for each Kilometer. The entire system for the military mapping of the country was metric.  Maybe this happens when a Frenchman was asked to do the Mapping of our island.

As Imperial and Metric are linearly dependent systems things like squares being 1.6cm for each kilometre are meaningless, indeed inevitable given that linear dependency.


The pertinent figure is 1:63,360 - the number of inches in a mile so the maps do indeed have an Imperial base.


A Frenchman wasn't asked to do the mapping of our Island. Check out the wikipedia pages for the first OS survey:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_Triangulation_of_Great_Britain


And its forerunner:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-French_Survey_(1784%E2%80%931790)


The baseline for the OS survey was measured using a 100 foot long chain. And the engineers were English and Scottish.

[Rather be walking]

Odd first post

Jon.

[adalard]

Odd first post

Yes - it reads almost like an exam question... 

[April]

Odd first post

Yes - it reads almost like an exam question... 

 

[pleb]

Yes - it reads almost like an exam question... 

Pay attention at the back, boy! 

[vizzavona]

Thanks for all that Percy....you are right the Metric system came after the initial surveys made by General Roy and others.   Maybe we also owe an odd sort of gratitude to rebellious Scots for bringing about the serious surveying of the country?
Roy was also involved with the French when 'doing work' on the Anglo-French surveys.
The National Grid system plus the double letter system wasn't applied to our O.S. maps until the between wars years when the 500 kl, 100 kl grid squares and all the rest down to the 1 kilometer squares that are so important when using our maps today.
I guess that we appear to have kind-of got our metric maps by the back door when after the muddled (well to me they were) imperial/national grid maps that we both knew and used in earlier decades. When the first series of the 1:50,000 maps were introduced where the contours were directly converted from the imperial contour system...I still have some of these maps with the odd numbers showing along with the contours.
So maybe not until the second series of 1:50,000 maps came along did we have our fully metric maps.