User talk:Nichollz

Welcome

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On counties we go by the Historic Counties Standard published by the Historic Counties Trust, and this places Swineshead in Huntingdonshire. The village is "locally situate" in Bedfordshire but is within a detached 'bubble' of Huntingdonshire. The Standard looked at detached parts and has ruled that those affected by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act can be treated as belonging to the surrounding county, or as part of both, but those parts unaffected by the Act remain part of their parent county, so Dudley is in Worcestershire and Swineshead in Huntingdonshire.

On the interactive county map, Swineshead does appear in Bedfordshire and Dudley appears in Staffordshire, but this map is at an interim stage and does not yet show the detached parts. They will be added in due course. Even the Historic Counties Trust's boundary data published as a map overlay misses the detached parts.

Bedfordshire is not as well represented on Wikishire as it ought to be. I have been trying over the last few days to fill the redlinks from the county's article, but the villages of the county need filling in, which would be a lot of work (and any offer of help will be welcome!) One thing the Bedfordshire article needs is a photograph in the infobox and while it would be impossible for one picture to represent Bedfordshire as a whole, any suggestions for that photo would be welcome.

A recent article on the BBC website celebrated county flags and I see that it shows a proposed Bedfordshire county flag as an example. If this can be a springboard for launching a Bedfordshire county flag competition, the Wikishire article will be linked to from the competition website, so we need to make it good enough to celebrate Bedfordshire properly.

RB 21:15, 21 April 2014 (UTC)