An Ordnance Survey team have been travelling across Britain chronicling the changes to the landscape, and have included a centenary badge on the hillsides above Fovant village in Wiltshire.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Fovant Badges in Wiltshire. If you haven't come across them before, they are regimental badges that were carved into the chalk downs above the village of Fovant by the soldiers of those regiments.
To mark the anniversary, the Fovant Badges Society, the voluntary organisation which maintains the badges, commissioned the addition of a centenary badge to mark 100 years of the Fovant Badges, and securing their long-term future.
The trustees of the Society decided that the centenary was best marked by the building of a new badge on the hillside. The new design is a poppy with '1916' and '2016' lettering. As far as possible the new badge used construction techniques that would have been familiar to the soldiers stationed in the area in World War One.
[caption id="attachment_42481" align="aligncenter" width="961"]
The foggy October morning witnessed by the OS survey team[/caption]
Each of the original badges represents a regiment that was stationed at Fovant during WW1, up until the camp closure in the 1920s.
Keith Lanham, who is part of the OS survey team, said: "On a foggy October morning, I climbed the west-facing escarpment to survey the new badge. Using my GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) kit, I was able plot the fresh chalk outline of the 25-metre diameter poppy and two dates.
"The most difficult aspect of the task was not the climb to the badges' location, or the steepness of the survey site, but how to show the detail with regards to current product specification. This is possibly the first completely new hill figure to be surveyed for a century.
"With the help of the specification team, we decided to show the poppy and 1916-2016 dates in full, due to the importance of this memorial to those who fell in the Great War."
The Fovant Badges will appear in the OS MasterMap which is available from their website: www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk
[caption id="attachment_42483" align="aligncenter" width="650"]
The Fovant Badges as they will appear on the OS MasterMap product[/caption]
Your Comments
Be the first to comment on this article
Login or Register to post a comment on this article