Talk:List of Scottish counties by area

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Where did these figures come from? Some are wrong. For instance, Morayshire, is a lot larger than is stated. A 1937 gazetteer [1] gives the figure of 304,931 acres, is this obviously refering to the post-1890 administrative county, and not the traditional county. The real figure I imagine is over 400,000 acres. I will try to find the real figures, but if these were taken from the 1911 britannica, the chances are that many will be wrong. 80.255

The figures came from a wide variety of gazetters. Obviously some will be disputable, as even gazetteers from the same era tend to disagree. Hopefully we can get the right figures give or take an acre here or there. Owain 18:02, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

I suggest that [2] would be able to provide the most accurate figures, although calculating them, especially for the larger counties, might take some time. I'll have a look and see if I can come up with an accurate OS figure for Nairnshire a bit later, perhaps, and we can then compare it with the figure given on this list. 80.255 18:18, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Areas

Was that gazetteer really used as the only source for the list, in contradiction to the above claims? The only figure for the area of Cromartyshire I can find on VoB is 220,586  : hardly "an acre here or there". Morwen - Talk 10:30, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Further, the figure Bart gives for Argyll is 2,092,458, Inverness 2,616,498 : these figures evidently did not come from Bart. Morwen - Talk 10:34, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

It's a wiki. Change it then. Owain (talk) 10:44, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I did, and you reverted me, can I remind you? Morwen - Talk 10:47, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Don't be so facetious. You didn't edit the CONTENT, just removed the sources as I was adding them. I agree that the Cromartyshire figure was wrong, as I incorrectly added some of the detached portions to the total itself. Owain (talk) 10:52, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

You added a source which the article was not based on and in fact disagreed with, which is tantamount to academic fraud - if you are going to replace this with an actual valid list based on the source cited then the time to cite that source is then. This is to say nothing of the utter dubiousness of composing the article by taking figures from random gazetteers, which made such a nonsense of the list - and of the similar list List of English traditional counties by area that you should be ashamed. And if you were doing maths to make this list, it sounds like Wikipedia:original research to me. Morwen - Talk 10:55, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

It was based on it, but disagreed because of a misunderstanding of the figures. Academic fraud? Original research? Get a grip! I added together a detahced part to another figure I though represented the main body but in reality represented the total. This is not academic fraud or original research, because the figures came from the same article in the same gazetter. Errors creep in, that's why we have multiple editors scrutinising articles. Get off your high horse and FIX IT. Owain (talk) 10:58, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

It's not just Cromartyshire that's at issue here. I checked three figures against Bart and none of them agreed. I imagine some might. The article says 1,990,471 acres for Argll: this is the figure the 1911 encyclopedia britannica gives, but the figure Bart gives is 2,092,458. Bart doesn't give a figure for Cromartyshire that I can see, so this presents a fundamental problem in using him as a source. Using figures from different source distorts the ordering - as shown by the mess on the English article you made, - when looked at the actual 1831 census figures the ordering was different! it just compares apples with oranges. Why are you telling me to "FIX IT" whilst at the same time telling me not to edit the article in edit summaries? Mixed messages somewhat? I'm certainly not going to edit this article until you explicitly withdraw that edit summary rather than saying two different things to me at once. Morwen - Talk 11:04, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New table

So, looking at this, it seems Bart is excluding inland water and foreshore. I am vaguely concerned about the quality of the OCR of the gazetteers: the figure Groome gives for Perthshire is evidently wrong, but would we notice an 8/9 misreading? Morwen - Talk 11:48, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

So anyway it doesn't appear we can come up with a list of the areas of counties of Scotland prior to 1890 from the information at Vision of Britain. There are other sources we might look into: the census for 1881, or a clean scan of Groome : but unfortunately Groome doesn't always specify for single figures whether they are including water/foreshore or not. The earliest census areas I can find on VoB is for 1921: which is a bit odd. Alternatively, we certainly could have an article List of Scottish counties by area in 1971 or something.

Let's go for the 1971 list. Do you have that data? Mrsteviec 18:06, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I can get this out from the British Library no problem : it's recent enough they have it on the shelves. Poking around VoB, for some reason it looks like the data is weird. [3] omits Aberdeen(shire), [4] lists Aberdeen city but not shire. Morwen - Talk 08:17, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

County	Groome (1882-84)	Bart (1887)	1921 census
Aberdeen	1,260,625	1,251,451
Angus	569,840 acres, of which 6486 are foreshore and 3178 water	560,087
Argyll	2,083,126	2,092,458
Ayr	722,229 1/3 acres of land, 6075 1/3 of foreshore, and 6957 of water	729,186
Banff	439,219	412,258
Berwick	294,804¾ land, 1557½ water, 799 foreshore	296,362
Bute	143,997	139,440
Caithness	455,708	438,878
Clackmannan
Caithness
Dumfries	705,945 ¾ acres, of which 20,427 are foreshore and 5301 ½ water	680,217
Dunbarton	172,677 acres, of which 3814 are foreshore and 14,312½ water	154,542
East Lothian	179,142 (173,298 land, 5505 foreshore, 189½ water)	173,298
Fife
Inverness	2,708,237 (including 91,775 foreshore/water)	2,616,498
Kincardine	248,195 acres, of which 1463 are inland waters and 1385 are foreshore	245,346
Kinross	49,812¼ acres, of which 3327¼ are water	46,485
Kirkcudbright	610, 342¾ acres, of which 7678½ are water and 27,361 foreshore	574,587
Lanark	568,867.656 acres, of which, at the time of the Ordnance Survey, 564,283.928 were land, 27 408 foreshore, and 4556.320 water	564,284
Midlothian	234,926	231,724
Moray	312,378.810 acres (including foreshore and inland waters)	304,606
Nairn
Orkney
Peebles
Perthshire	11, 170 (evidently a mis-scan)	1,617,808
Renfrew
Ross	all, including Cromarty: 2,003,065 - excluding Cromarty : 1,861,571	no bart on VoB
Roxburgh	428,493, including 2836 water	425,657
Selkirk
Shetland
Stirling
Sutherland
West Lothian
Wigtown