Personally, it is good to see others adding field boundaries.
I thought it might be useful to describe my current practice with regard to
mapping field boundaries. In making the following comments, I would say that I
am interested in landscape maintenance and presevation and not just navigation.
We have had to fight several planning applications in our valley and
have won theses based on the quality of
the landscape. Having good maps of this is important. OSM could be
useful tool in this context.
I started mapping field boundaries as a Newbie (I'm not sure when you stop
being one) about 10 months back. At the time I made some enquires on the
Newbie mailing list about how to handle field boundaries and roads. From this
I concluded that you shouldn't join field boundaries to roads. I also started
mapping the field boundaries along roads. The suggestion seemed to be that
this should be done for completeness. Drawing field boundaries along roads is
diffcult to do neatly and looks messy at high OSM zoom. However when you scale
back, the road rendering masks this. It is probably worth going to more
trouble where main roads are concerned and their line is unlikely to be
adjusted. In JOSM you can create a parallel way from the road which can help.
I don't join field boundaries to rivers. This is a bit problematic as where I
live rivers can have quite dense tree coverage and are part of the landscape
character. I have yet to decide how this should be mapped. The same issue
relates to the railway embankments which have trees lining them although there
is fencing. Hepful suggestions would be welcome!
When it comes to dry stone walls that have collapsed in places and been patched
up with fencing, old gate or anything else the land owner has to hand I just
mark the whole boundary as a dry stone wall. I live in hope they will be
reparied! If there are clear, sizeable, lengths where the stones have been
removed. i.e. there is no chance it will ever be repaired I would try and mark
out the fence but it would
only be an estimate. Perhaps rather more contraversaly if the wall has
collapsed in its total length, and a wire fence has been put up but all the
stones remain in place I still am inclined to mark it as a wall. I am
thinking more in the context of the field boundary. i.e. If the
stones weren't there the fence probably wouldn't be. If the wall is heavily
overgrown and "looking" like a hedge I would still tag it as a wall.
When it comes to hedges that have been patched up with small sections of
fencing or have a fence parallel to them as they are no longer stock
proof I would again just mark this as a complete hedge. Hedges that have not
been cut for the last 10 years+ (we have a road locally where one side is cut
every year and is about 2 meters hight and the other side must be more than 10
meters) I still tag as hedges. Again, if there were obvious and large sections
of just fence or stone wall come to that I would tag these but they would only
be an estimate.
If the hedge has become a line of trees (i.e. no longer used as a stock
boundary) then I use natural=tree_row. It seems the most suitable tag
available but doesn't render on the OSM map.
Where paths pass through gaps in boundaries I tend (if the gap is small) to map
this as a complete boundary with an "entrance" node where the path passes
through the boundary.
I do tag the source as survey;bing if I have seen it or just bing if it from
the imagery only. If I have walked along it or have waymarked the end I would
probably add "gps".
If your using JOSM it is well worth "hacking" your own preset to do the above.
You can also add a source drop down list to make adding this easy to do.
When it comes to drawing the ways that make up a field I'm afraid I am not
consistant in how I do this. i.e. I don't draw each side of a field as a
seperate way and the ways may make up more than one field. This I'm sure isn't
compatable with tagging individual field landuse at a later date. Sorry. I
would add on this subject that there is an area where someone has gone to a
great deal of trouble to map out all the individual fields as seperate fields
with a landuse=field tag. I don't currrently know how to tag these with a
boundary tag as it would seem I would end up with a wall on top of a wall for
each field if I just added barrier=wall to each area. Any suggestions on how
to do this would be appreciated.
Apologies for going on a bit but I though the above comments might be helpful.
Regards
Dudley
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