Navigable waterways 1600-1947

As part of an earlier ESRC grant we aimed to provide four snapshots of the navigable waterways of Britain in 1820, 1851, 1861 and 1881. The far greater value of this dataset if its attribute data was extended to provide proper opening and closing dates for each section of waterway became apparent. Thanks to the availability of funding from the Leverhulme Trust to create attribute data for the period 1600-1729 and generous additional funding from the Isaac Newton Trust, this goal has now been realised. Note that in some instances navigable rivers as digitised project well beyond the coastline. This is because the coastline is digitised to the high-tide line whereas the rivers follow standard practise of the Ordnance Survey in being digitised to where the river meet the sea at low water.