Watsonian vice-counties
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Watsonian vice-counties are subdivisions of Great Britain and Ireland used largely for the purposes of biological recording and other scientific data-gathering.
The vice-counties are based on the traditional counties of Britain, but often subdiving these boudaries to creates smaller, more uniform units, and considering exclaves to be part of the vice county in which they locally lie. They provide a stable basis for recording using similarly-sized units, and, although grid-based reporting has grown in popularity, they remain a standard in the vast majority of ecological surveys, allowing data collected over long periods of time to be compared easily.
The vice-counties were introduced in Hewett Cottrell Watson who first used them in the third volume of his Cybele Britannica published in 1852. He refined the system somewhat in later volumes. The vice-counties remain unchanged by subsequent local government reorganisations, allowing historical and modern data to be more accurately compared.
Every vice-county in Britain has a name, and additionally, they are numbered from 1 to 112.
List of vice-counties
The vice counties of England, Scotland and Wales are as follows:
- West Cornwall with Scilly
- East Cornwall
- South Devon
- North Devon
- South Somerset
- North Somerset
- North Wiltshire
- South Wiltshire
- Dorset
- Isle of Wight
- South Hampshire
- North Hampshire
- West Sussex
- East Sussex
- East Kent
- West Kent
- Surrey
- South Essex
- North Essex
- Hertfordshire
- Middlesex
- Berkshire
- Oxfordshire
- Buckinghamshire
- East Suffolk
- West Suffolk
- East Norfolk
- West Norfolk
- Cambridgeshire
- Bedfordshire
- Huntingdonshire
- Northamptonshire
- East Gloucestershire
- West Gloucestershire
- Monmouthshire
- Herefordshire
- Worcestershire
- Warwickshire
- Staffordshire
- Shropshire
- Glamorgan
- Breconshire
- Radnorshire
- Carmarthenshire
- Pembrokeshire
- Cardiganshire
- Montgomeryshire
- Merioneth
- Caernarvonshire
- Denbighshire
- Flintshire
- Anglesey
- South Lincolnshire
- North Lincolnshire
- Leicestershire with Rutland
- Nottinghamshire
- Derbyshire
- Cheshire
- South Lancashire
- West Lancashire
- South-east Yorkshire
- North-east Yorkshire
- South-west Yorkshire
- Mid-west Yorkshire
- North-west Yorkshire
- Durham
- South Northumberland
- North Northumberland
- Westmoreland with Furness
- Cumberland
- Isle of Man
- Dumfriesshire
- Kircudbrightshire
- Wigtownshire
- Ayrshire
- Renfrewshire
- Lanarkshire
- Peebleshire
- Selkirkshire
- Roxburghshire
- Berwickshire
- East Lothian
- Midlothian
- West Lothian
- Fife
- Stirlingshire
- West Perth
- Mid Perth
- East Perth
- Angus
- Kincardineshire
- South Aberdeenshire
- North Aberdeenshire
- Banffshire
- Moray
- Easterness
- Westerness
- Main Argyll
- Dunbartonshire
- Clyde Isles
- Kintyre
- South Ebudes
- Mid Ebudes
- North Ebudes
- West Ross
- East Ross
- East Sutherland
- West Sutherland
- Caithness
- Outer Hebrides
- Orkney
- Shetland
See also
References
- Vice-county map from the British Bryological Society (http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/bbs/Recording/vcmappage.htm)
- Report on a project to store maps defining vice country boundaries in digital format (http://www.nbn.org.uk/downloads/files/Vice%20County%20Boundaries%20Project%20Report) The report contains details of the origins of the Vice-counties (PDF).