I assume those Irish milestones that Joe saw in 1937 were pretty old. Does
anyone know when the Irish mile died out? It is listed in the Oxford English
Dictionary (1933) as "still in rustic use."
The Irish mile was 2048 m (6720 English feet or 2240 English yards), much
longer than the English mile of 1609 m (5280 English feet or 1760 yards).
Irish feet, inches, and yards were, by that time, the same as the English,
but the longer Irish mile reportedly derived from the fact that the Irish
used a perch (rod) of 21 feet or 7 yards rather than the English rod of 16.5
feet or 5.5 yards. Since long tradition going back to Greek and Roman times
dictated that a furlong (stadium) had to be 40 perches (rods), and also that
a mile was 8 furlongs (stadia), the Irish mile had to be 21 x 40 x 8 = 6720
feet.
Apparently, the older Saxon English rod was 15 Saxon (Northern) feet, a
Saxon foot being about 33.5 cm. (I doubt that those Saxons really had such
gigantic feet!) But since England later adopted the much shorter London foot
of 30.48 cm, this presented a problem. They couldn't change all the deed and
land descriptions, which were in Saxon rods. So, to keep the traditional
relationships between rod, furlong, and mile, Queen Elizabeth I redefined
the rod as 16.5 London feet, which is 3.3 paces of 5 feet each. That meant
that the 40-rod furlong also had to be increased from 625 [London] feet or
125 paces (the traditional values inherited from the Romans) to 660 [London]
feet or 132 paces or 220 yards, which in turn meant that the mile had to be
increased from 1000 paces or 5000 feet (the traditional Roman values, though
an awkward 1666+2/3 yards) to 5280 feet or 1056 paces or 1760 English yards.
Whew!
Now there were also different Scottish miles, which apparently varied with
time and place. One was 1811 m (5928 Scottish feet or 1976 Scottish yards).
Scottish length units were reportedly slightly longer than the English: the
Scots inch was 2.55 cm, which made a 30.6 cm Scots foot and a 91.8 cm Scots
yards (not to be confused with the Scots ell of 37 Scots inches or 94.5
cm!). But I haven't discovered how they arrived at the value of 1976 yards.
As the BWMA folks like to point out, it's all such a logical, natural
system! So much better than that irrational, artificial metric system the
Gummint is trying to force upon us!
-----Original Message-----
Joe Reid wrote:
Were those English miles or Irish miles? In 1937 I set out to bicycle from
Lisburn, just south of Belfast, to Dublin. Outside the door there was a
milestone that said "Dublin 72 miles". That seemed to be a reasonable
distance for a day on a bicycle. A few miles later there was a Royal
Automobile Club sign that said "Dublin 96 miles". That was when I learned
the difference between Irish miles and imperial miles.
