Taking Stock - and some Maps

It's now just about two years since I started this blog.  In that time I've managed to work my way through the larger places in Somerset (and those with the older postal history), at least those places that I have material for.

After a brief diversion onto some maps that I've "scribbled", I shall start working my way through the smaller villages in Somerset, those with UDC, Climax Rubber or CDS (double circle double-arc) cancels - with brief forays back into the older postal history of Somerst as I get any new (old) material.

o-------------o

Now for a few maps I've "scribbled" to do with Bath.  There is a site, www.scribblemaps.com, that allows one to scribble on maps - when I started playing with the site it was free, but there is now a $5 charge per month for the Pro features (I managed to get most of what I wanted to do done before the charges came in).

One thing I used the site for was to plot out the extent of the postal service managed out of Bath for:

1. the Penny Post period,
2. the Undated Circular cancel (UDC) period, 
3. the Rubber Climax cancels,
4. and the addresses that came under Bath in 1972 (taken from "Postal Addresses", March 1972 issued by The Post Offfice.

Here are the series of four maps, to the same approximate scale.  Where there is a number in a circle, that indicates that there are that number of points there, within the scale of the map.

It is interesting to see that the area managed by Bath expands after the Penny Post period, staying approximately the same for UDCs (mainly 1844-1857) and Rubber Climax handstamps (1885-1933), and then shrank back, so that by 1972 the area served from Bath was similar to that in the Penny Post period.