Historic boundary reveals real heart of county

IN your article about locating the geographical centre of Yorkshire, (Yorkshire Post, February 27) you quote Melanie Osborne of the Ordnance Survey as saying that “Yorkshire does not actually exist any more”. She also explains how the Ordnance Survey calculated the centre of a “non-existent area”. I’m confused. If you define the area, surely it exists?

Of course, many thousands of us know Yorkshire still exists because we live there, as generations of our families have done before us, and hopefully, our descendants will too.

In March 2008, you published a story in which another centre of Yorkshire was identified at Cattal. Perhaps there could be a ceremonial moving of the county’s centre to Hessay, perhaps on Yorkshire Day?

But wait... before we start arranging the event, there could be at least one other claimant. The centre of the county depends on which boundary you recognise.

Since 1974, many organisations have produced their own definitions of Yorkshire, as the Ordnance Survey may have done for the non-existent area. Perhaps it would be a good idea to go back to the Yorkshire Boundary which has existed for over 1,100 years, and recalculate the centre from that.

The county boundaries have not been shown on maps since the 1970s but they still exist.

Most of Yorkshire’s boundary is marked by geographical features such as the coast, major rivers and watersheds. The issue is not whether the boundary, and hence the county still exist, it’s about whether people recognise them.

The Yorkshire Ridings Society, which gave the county Yorkshire Day and which registered the White Rose as the flag of Yorkshire among many other achievements, is currently working with map makers to produce a county map showing the relationship between the county and Ridings boundaries and the local government areas.

We hope this will be widely available in the next few months.