Bat Bridges, or why deleting lonely tags is a bad idea

The other day I was idly browsing the blog of Mark Avery, the former conservation director of the British bird protection society, the RSPB. One item caught my attention: it was about 'bat bridges'. Although I hadn't heard of them before it was pretty obvious what they might be.

A bat bridge on the A590 in Cumbria

Bats tend to follow linear features in the landscape when foraging at night, at least in part because they provide protection from predators. Bats tend to avoid flying over open spaces. Hedgerows, edges of woods, and so on, form commuting routes between roosting and feeding sites for bats. When these are damaged or destroyed, for instance by road building, bats either lose feeding locations or have to cross the open space. Usually they do this by flying low: effective against their age-old predators, but not much help when confronted by a car.

Contributing to the Lesotho Mapathon

At the start of August I appeared in the OpenStreetMap stats for users adding most data in a day. This was the first time in ages that I've made enough edits to appear. The reason: I've been contributing this past week to a mapathon to map as much of Lesotho as possible. This has been co-ordinated by Irish OSM contributors, some of whom will travel to Lesotho early next year.

A village in Mokhotlong District.
This is S of the area I have mapped, but looks similar on aerial photos.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The co-ordination makes use of the HOT Task Manager: a piece of software which has distant origins in something, long gone, called QualityStreetMap.

I've use the Task Manager fairly rarely, but development over the past year has added one feature which for makes it much easier to use: the creation of a bounding box in the JOSM editor. It is now much simpler to see the area one has undertaken to map. This in turn is important in reducing editing conflicts and redundant work.

Upland woods in the Schwarzwald

I wasn't done with looking at woodlands from a mapping perspective in Baden-Wurttemburg. A couple of days after SotM I walked from the top of the gondola at Feldberg to the Feldberg summit and then back to Hinterzarten.

The first part of the walk was somewhat marred by a fierce hailstorm which left me fairly damp. However I recuperated by drying out a bit over Kaffee and Kuchen at the Baldenweger Huette below the summit.

Forest path, part of the Emil-Thoma-Weg.

Former Pubs

An inevitable problem arises when mapping in Britain these days. How does one map dead pubs?

Pubs have been dying at an increasing tempo ever since the Beer Orders of 1989. Some of this is due to the rapacity of the 'pubcos', but much is due to cheap supermarket booze, social change in inner-city areas, and a broader range of alternative means of entertainment. Although dead pubs exist everywhere, it's the ones in inner-city areas, or suburban estates, which I notice most frequently.

Some pubs are 'zombies', having fallen into a 'close-reopen-fail-close' cycle (phrase nicked from Richard on IRC). These can often be identified by the 'run your own pub' banners outside. There are also pubs which are only slightly more alive: often remarkably difficult to work out their actual status when walking past during the day. Just occasionally one of this class of pub gets resurrected. I tend to tag all such pubs as ordinary pubs, but if currently closed will add "(closed)" after the name. I do this for two reasons: an amazing number do show a triumph of hope over experience, and re-open; and, secondly, pubs are important navigational landmarks. The Target roundabout at Northolt on the A40 is a good example of the latter, even though the pub closed in 1986 when it was converted to a burger bar.

Once the pub sign has gone and all the windows are boarded up then I'm willing to accordingly change the tagging to amenity=dead_pub or similar. Usually such pubs either change use, or get demolished. Local to Nottingham they've turned into supermarkets (two Tesco Express stores : the Jolly Higglers, 17/21st Lancers), Indian restaurants (The Poachers Tavern now the Gurkha Kitchen) and mosques (Le Grand, Hyson Green , and possibly The Boulevard). The A610, Nuthall Road, has a large number of recently demolished pubs, typically they are replaced by housing. Other recent housing developments include : Cremorne Drive is a private gated road in The Meadows on the site of the Cremorne Hotel; Beaumont Square has been built on the site of The Wollaton Arms.

Elsewhere, the Stonor Arms in Stonor has been closed since the early 2000s, and despite recentish press coverage didn't look likely to open again last summer, but The Robin Hood in Pinkneys Green sprang into life again in 2007 after being boarded-up for 6 years. So its remarkably difficult to be certain about dead pubs.

A very few remain intact as buildings but with a changed use, like The Dover Castle (photo above), now let as student accommodation. I don't know when this closed, but it was already there by the time of the 1891 census. Familiarity with an area, or close inspection of the building will reveal the former use: then it's worth recording them as building=pub.

P.S. Chris Richards (riffdesign) has some nice atmospheric photos of Radford between '70s and early 90s, including several dead pubs.