Cottenham Open

Companion video to: Andrew Zolnai Blog: Even more temporal maps http://bit.ly/p3pWfp

Cambs. Surf. Geol. Time.avi

And here is her talk from the same twitter thread as above:

A fantastic array of cultural data was recently released by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/os-open-zoomstack.html" target="_blank">Ordnance Survey</a>&nbsp;and added to this Cambridgeshire map. It clearly offers opportunities to assess the natural and man-made infrastructure in our area. Green spaces and sites are shown here.

Engaging villagers North of Cambridge at the edge of East Anglia Fens

start

This is what the region looked like on a 1610 pen-and-ink-on-vellum map. Economic geo-history data, chronicled by HC Darby as&nbsp;Medieval Fenlands&nbsp;and&nbsp;Drainage of the Fens, were added to Ordnance Survey Open Data Parish polygons released in 2010 as&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.zolnai.ca/2010/04/medieval-fenlands-gis.html" target="_blank">explained</a> from Darby&nbsp;<a href="https://flic.kr/s/aHskdaVXAD" target="_blank">figures</a>.

Prof. Sue Oosthuizen's pictorial calendar year of Rampton commons, affected by winter floods in the medieval wetlands (before East Anglia fen drainage in the...

1680s Rampton (Cambs., UK) Fen Edge cattle pasture rotation

The maritime history aspect was spurred on by&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/DrSueOosthuizen" target="_blank">Prof. Susan Oosthuizen</a>&nbsp;tweeting to re-frame geo-history in Northwest Europe:

Managing water in and through the peat Fenland, c.900-1300AD by Dr Susan Oosthuizen, Reader in Medieval Archaeology, University of Cambridge. A conference by...

OWLP Conference 2015: Dr Susan Oosthuizen

Why is it significant? During most of the Quaternary Period, East Anglia was under the North European ice-cap. When it melted, the disappearance of the weight of the ice caused a&nbsp;glacial rebound, that is East Anglia rose slightly and the trapped water caused the marshlands characterising the region before the drainage of the Fens, as per HC Darby mentioned above.

Blood red lunar eclipse 6 mi N of Cambridge UK On Fuji Finepix T400 4 sec, ISO 100, 50mm, max ap. 3.53

Blood red lunar eclipse 201509280320

Being so close to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thejockeyclub.co.uk/newmarket/" target="_blank">Newmarket race courses</a>, it's no surprise it has its own village point-to-point race course with steeple chases as:

East Anglia historic economic geography was mapped adding Darby's Parish by Parish statistics to Ordnance Survey Parish polygons: that geographic unit has changed little since&nbsp;<a href="http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/" target="_blank">Domesday survey</a>&nbsp;in 1085.

The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cottenhampc.org.uk/" target="_blank">Cottenham Parish Council</a>&nbsp;already has a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cottenhampc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Cottenham-Community-Directory-%E2%80%93-A5-Guide.pdf" target="_blank">May 2019 Directory</a>&nbsp;in PDF and print format. And given the information shown above, could it not be published:<ul><li>interactive,</li><li>linkable and</li><li>time-stamped?</li></ul>

Raising the sea level rise thus mimics the water encroaching right after glaciation: the new modeled shoreline thus approximates the ancient shoreline. This map thus reflects pre-medieval marshland that gradually became sea northward. Hence the observations above about villages, roads and islands.

Look at this sea level rise map: See how the villages form a necklace around the elevated seashore, and how some roads follow high-stands, and many settlements are on high ground.

Map modelling a 7 m. seal-level rise, data provided by NASA, details in the live map below

Cottenham point to point Sun 06/12/09 race 6 div 2 1st leader blue, 2nd monkerty tunkerty

Cottenham PTP Maiden race Sun 06/12/09 Monkerty Tunkerty

The topographic map shows 10 m contours with warmer colours in higher elevations (credits in image). The hills to the east - in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex - wrap around the flat Fenlands in and north of Cambridgeshire, which extend toward the Wash in the North.

Filmed in March 2019 during the 10 days celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Cottenham Methodist Church being used as a Community Centre and Cafe. Events and happenings were organised for each of the days and this video shows a sample of some of those.

Cottenham Community Centre - 10 days of celebratory events

This was in aid of the now-defunct Fenlands Heritage Environment Project, an effort to combine historic and current information to help promote tourism in the area.

Here is a video from her study, in the twitrter thread, of 1680s Fen edge cattle pasture rotations in Rampton: it's the neighbouring village to mine, and along which I go for many walks.

This will support the purpose of the Cottenham Open project: to foster local business and community engagement, by providing open access to local geographic and environmental data that are time stamped.

<a href="https://theodi.org/" target="_blank">Open data</a>&nbsp;offer so many opportunities to describe a locality in useful ways, not just pictures and maps, but also for example drive times.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/opendata.html" target="_blank">Ordnance Survey</a>&nbsp;vector road maps enable the 'travelling salesman problem', that is, calculate how long it takes to get somewhere from one spot. This map is centered on Coolidge Gardens, Cottenham.

Apr. 2020 add.: Here is a fascination <a href="https://twitter.com/DrSueOosthuizen/status/1250070899279179779?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">twitter thread</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/DrSueOosthuizen" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@DrSueOosthuizen</a>, who helped start my <a href="https://blog.zolnai.ca/2010/04/medieval-fenlands-gis.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Medieval Fenlands</a> project exactly 10 yrs ago!

Cottenham has little light or noise pollution, as seen or heard here.

<a href="https://www.cottenhamcc.org/" target="_blank">The Cottenham Community Centre</a> celebrated early June 2019 its ten years with poetry and other events.

"Cottenham is a 2927 hectare civil parish centered upon a village of the same name within Cambridgeshire, England. Cottenham is one of the larger dormitory villages surrounding the city of Cambridge, located around five miles north of the city. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 Census was 6095. Cottenham is one of a number of villages that make up the historical Fen Edge region in between Cambridge and Ely, which were originally settlements on the shore of the marshes close to the city of Cambridge, then an inland port." [Wikipedia, incl. photo above]

Section around Cottenham (digitally restored by author). Harvard Map Collection, Harvard College Library: Cambridgeshire, England and vicinity, 1610 (Raster Image)

Stay tuned for further web maps, story maps,&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.zolnai.ca/" target="_blank">blog posts</a>&nbsp;and a new website, as a local community engagement model is developed.

The&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_English_wool_trade" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">medieval Flemish wool trade</a>&nbsp;was key to early economic development illustrated above by HC Derby.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=04fa6ed8746b451892f339011aaf989d" target="_blank">Distributive flow lines models</a>&nbsp;show what traffic between East Anglia and Belgian / Dutch lowlands might have looked like, orange eastbound from Norwich etc. and green westbound from Antwerp etc. - numbers are only indicative based on vessel capacity from current World Port Index, and this is straight point-to-point model, but it illustrates the flow - follow also Sue Oosthuizen mentioned above into similar fascinating glimpses of Fenlands history and English language.

Blood red moon lunar eclipse 2015/09/28 03:20, album below

This was to help canvass for the previous EU elections: how to best reach constituents by address only with no personal information - this presaged GDPR concerns around data protection and retention.

Such static desktop maps were then set as web maps on various platforms. This web map of East Anglia at right or top displays the post-Medieval soil types and taxation as a measure of historic wealth. Such easily readable and accessible maps help convey historic statistics to the public in a kiosk format.

Cambridgeshire soil types video below: Darby economic history mentioned above, British Geological Survey web map of surficial geology, &amp; Darby 1877 surficial geology, detailed&nbsp;<a href="http://www.zolnai.ca/medfen/medfenmetanew.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. Full map shown too.