What is a Curry Stool
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.พ. 2024
- Curry Stools, named after their resemblance to three-legged stools and the person who devised them: Ernest Curry / Cpl Ernie Curry, are an intriguing relic of the Ordnance Survey's efforts to map and survey remote areas. From 1936 through the 1960s, these concrete structures were strategically placed in marshy terrain where traditional trigonometric surveying methods faced challenges due to unstable ground.
The Ordnance Survey, tasked with mapping the landscapes of the United Kingdom with precision, encountered difficulties in establishing trigonometric points in certain regions characterized by marshlands. These areas posed significant obstacles for laying the foundations of traditional trig points. To overcome this challenge, the ingenious solution of Curry Stools was devised.
These three-legged concrete structures served as stable platforms upon which the theodolite, a precise surveying instrument, could be securely positioned. By providing a reliable and firm base in marshy terrain, Curry Stools enabled surveyors to conduct accurate measurements for mapping purposes. Their placement in remote and often inaccessible areas speaks to the dedication of surveying teams in ensuring comprehensive mapping coverage across the landscape.
Although the advent of modern surveying techniques and technology may have rendered Curry Stools obsolete, they remain as silent witnesses to the meticulous efforts of surveyors in overcoming geographical challenges. Today, encountering these curious structures while hiking through the hills offers a glimpse into the historical methods employed to chart the topography of the land.
There are still nine Curry Stools which can be visited. Below I have given the grid reference of each.
If you do pay them a visit don’t forget to give them a clean - even if it’s just using your boot to scuff off any vegetation. This way they will still be around for future generations.
Cellar Head - Isle of Lewis. Grid Ref: NB 54777 55560
Cam Hill - Shetland Isles. Grid Ref: HU 50015 92806
Ness of Copister - Shetland Isles. Grid Ref: HU 49328 78758
Scotasay Island - Western Isles. Grid Ref: NG 18515 97437
Killin - Monadhlaith Mountains. Grid Ref: NH 51250 09333
Rubh Aird na Sgitheich - Jura. Grid Ref: NR 47722 79025
Herdship Fell - Pennines. Grid Ref: NY 80020 32521
Iron Band - Pennines. Grid Ref: NY 83405 18653
Bink Moss - Pennines. Grid Ref: NY 87665 24217
Here is the link to the TH-cam video explaining how Trig Points actually work.
• How do trig points act...
I've got to admit, it's not what I initially thought of when I heard 'curry stools'....
Nor me! I was thinking of an 'emergency evacuation' in the wild after the previous evenings takeaway!!
Marvellously enticing title and thumbnail. 😄 Absolutely truthful though, not clickbait!
@@astrecksMe too. I was struggling to make a connection between navigation and a wild poo.
Evenings spent in the vinda-loo....
Yep, I’m right there with you, not what I was expecting at all🤣🤣
A curry stool is a type of survey mark used in peaty areas where a pillar would sink and natural rock was not available. The concrete, in the form of three arms meeting at a central point, sits on the peat and it was hoped to be a stable platform.
Oi! Loke a giant office pushpin on my wall map! ( Yes, analog maps are still fun in a digital world)
What a cool name, thank you, Mr Curry
Thank you!
Could they make them more obvious by putting a pillar on top of it? Make a tetrahedral shape?
Thank You.
Yes, we watched the video too!
A random bit of information that will stay in my head forever, but you never know.
That sums up perfectly what I was thinking.
@mstayloronlineyes, that always makes me twitch, I have mostly learned to block it out.
This was another very interesting video of yours. Thanks for all that interesting information.
Fascinating. Thank you.
I spent years as a chainman and surveyor working in Queensland. Once GPS became commonplace would often use trig points for references. Was amazed how accurate some actually proved to be and often disappointed at how poorly many were maintained. Other survey marks were lock spits which were used when the ground was too stony or hard to place a survey post correctly. Many of these were over 100 years old. Many more have been destroyed by clearing fence lines along boundaries.
I used to read some of the old Alaska mining journals and the accuracy that those early geologists back then measured distances was amazingly accurate, for hiking and counting chain or steps etc. Like if you overlay a map from 1900 or so with a modern google earth or usgs map it’s almost exactly correct at the smaller scales.
@@alexburke1899 I've had occasions to use old microfiche blowups of surveys and then overlay on modern mapping. Almost always got me within a few metres of the spots. I actually located an old coal Adit by overlays of old plans within an existing coal mine The Adit dated 1895. We dug through it in 2008 and could identify the structure. Fortunately it was all caved and solidified.
Thanks Sir ,never heard of a Curry stool before,, keep up the great info 💪🏻
What a pleasant fellow.
I could listen to him read the phone book.
I live about 5 miles down in the valley from this Curry Stone. I came across it just before Christmas on my walk, and wondered what it was. Now I know. I revisited it this weekend (17 March) and not only cleaned it off with a conveniently left brush. But did some arial 360 degree shots with my drone. Which perfectly showed the scenic location around it.
Do you not get any grief flying a drone next to the folk who use Warcop Fell for their stuff?
Not at all, as I'm quite well known by this establishment and they know my intentions are good. In fact they like seeing my videos. No people or installations are ever photographed. Besides that area is a no fly zone. So droning not possible inside it. I hope that answers your question. I enjoy watching you're videos by the way. Very informative.
Ah, the Great Retriangulation of 1936 . . . You sometimes see brass survey pins on their own as you potter around the UK - I remember tripping (literally) over one on the Norfolk Coast Path east of Hunstanton.
Different methods apply elsewhere of course.
Working on a civil engineering scheme at a township called Keewatin in NW Ontario we had to call in a local surveyor to remark property boundaries - mere engineers couldn't be trusted with a "transit" (what the Canadians called a plunging theodolite) for land surveys so a chartered surveyor was required.
He pointed out some existing property pins he managed to find and told us to look closely at them: octagonal steel pins with a hole in the centre.
"Know what they are? The Crown Survey bought up a load of defective Winchester rifle barrels and cut them up for survey markers instead of using Rock Posts."
I spent long hours standing at cold, exposed trig points as a trainee land surveyor in the early 80s but always in the South of England so never seen or heard of a Curry Stool.
Thanks for another interesting video
Im affected by the inverse of that law.
When I take my jacket off, it starts raining.
My house has its own version.
When i turn the shower on, it starts raining.
It's why you take the jacket, so it doesn't rain. It would 100% rain if you don't take the jacket.
00:30 "WE need to climb a mountain" 😂 ...Greetings from the Alps
Never heard of a Curry stool before. Thank you
Must not be many Indian restaurants in your area....
I came for navigation but the extra's and the waffles make this channel so much more. Thank you, Sir.
@@jbuckley2546 Maybe you're a moron?
I hope you enjoy making these additional informative videos so we get to see many more, even on topics beyond navigation and cartography if they interest you. Your own fascination and amusement are evident, not a mere presenter but a fellow enthusiast.
US Coast and Geodetic Survey used many different methods to get clear lines of sight. High hills always were prized but, in some cases, to get accurate measurement of gully depth they used very tall scaffolding towers bridging the gully bottom up to line of sight of another point. Same when lower hill tops had trees up on top that it was not legal to cut down due protected status in Wilderness areas.
There is a similar law to yours about rain and waterproofs. Mine is that when waiting in a queue of traffic, it will start moving three seconds after you apply the handbrake.
Very informative. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and passion.
Your presentations of a dry, but fascinating topic, are both instructive and enjoyable. Cheers.
Fantastic. Every day's a school day! I just love being able to listen to intelligent people talk about their passion. I'm no rambler, personally, although I love the countryside, but I always have time to listen to people talk about their passion.
I really enjoy your cheerful, no-nonsense dissertations. Keep 'em coming, comrade! 😊
Fascinating!! I knew a bit about trig points and have seen many on my travels, but I knew nothing of the Curry Stool! I do now and will never forget it! Thank you.😊
I don't know if I needed to know it or not but , I now know wtf a Curry Stool is . I may never be the same man again.
The iron-clad law "What can go wrong, will" is correctly attributed to Finagle, the lesser-known colleague of Captain Murphy.
Still learning and I'm nearly 80! Thank you.👍
Cool!
Fantastic stuff. Great channel.
Thanks !
Absolutely here for the poop jokes
Excellent, thanks for sharing.
Thank you, very informative. I've never heard of them before.
For 67 years, I had never heard of a curry stool. Then yesterday, Alan Davis mentioned it on QI. Making fun of the expression, of course. And now, one day later, I see your video. How's that for coincidence! Anyway, quite enjoyed it!
Fascinating that. Thanks.
Informative and interesting video; thank you for the trouble you went to when making it (rain/snow etc.)
We always have to calculate back to the SI. Technicians and some other people use your measurement system.
Have you tried using ponchos against the rain? Seems less work to put on & off🙂
Nooooooo wait until you have rain and wind at same time. I had a poncho when I was a cadet. Never again!
Brilliant 😊
Why didn't they just put a survey marker somewhere else, where they can make a normal one? How do they decide where they need to place markers?
You need line of sight from one survey point to the next, so I would presume they are in areas there the marsh is large enough they didn't have any other option.
Excellent share - I had no idea.
Thanks for this great information.
So was that actually more stable than a deep concrete foundation? I imagine the peat doesn’t care what’s sticking in it.
Thanks for that. Really interesting.
I've never heard of a curry stool, but it made sense as soon as you mentioned the trig point.
I did a bit of surveying in college, and a theodolite is a very heavy, delicate piece of kit.
It makes so much sense to build a stable platform around the survey points.
We dont do it that way in the US, as far as I know, there are definitely survey pins, but you simply set your tripod over them until your spot on.
It's a trig point on marshy ground.
What happens when trig points move due to seismic plate movement, landslides, or earthquakes? How are corrections made so property lines are kept accurate?
I don't know how it is done in the UK.
When I assisted a surveyor in marking property lines and corners on the property I was buying in Oregon, he used a highly accurate gps and laser distance measurement to confirm the points. The location of a property corner which happened to be on a very steep and unstable slope was was recorded by its relation to other marked points on less mobile parts of the landscape. We made no attempt to sink a monument into that point in space, as any such monument would certainly not stay in place over time.
Most trig points are well documented and move the same relative amount from seismic plate movement. Landslides will simply destroy the trig point though how that could happen due to their placement on normally stable hilltops is hard to envisage. Earthquakes can potentially result in discrepancies being measurable between previous observations on trig points and indeed that is a common method used by surveyors, geologists and vulcanologists to measure ground movement. Classic examples are the measurements between New Zealands North and South Islands, measurements of the slope distortions between known points during the Mount St Helens eruption in USA and ground movement and distortion during the current eruptions in Iceland.
These points have little or nothing to do with property lines, they're used mostly for earth science purposes. As to movement, that's one of their purposes! Points like this are measured within very high tolerances, even higher than is typically used for determining property lines. The idea is that their position is monitored over time and compared to each other to determine movement which helps scientists to see how the land moves over vast areas due to plate tectonics, etc. In the 1980's I was fortunate enough to learn the "old school" methods using theodolites then moved on to using GPS. In the early 90's this had already been replaced by satellite systems that measured the actual ground itself as opposed to triangulation points such as seen here.
We don't have earthquakes in the UK,
@@dogwalker666 I beg to differ on that point! Market Rasen earthquake of 2008 was 5.2 on the Richter Scale, it scared the cr*p out of me!
Very interesting! We have something that serves the same purpose in the States. Here they are called bench marks. A bronze disc, engraved with identification markings. I've seen them set into sidewalks, mountain tops, even railway abutments. Haven't looked in a marsh, so I don't know how we handle that, or if we do.
The benchmark disks you are referring to are used as horizontal control points for determining elevation. The curry stools are used for setting up a tripod mounted theodolite (transit, total station, etc.) over a survey control point.
If you had asked me to make up an imaginary thing that one would encounter in the British countryside to fool someone who had never been there, "Curry stool upon-the-moors" would be one such example.
Yes, but what's a pedal stool?
Very interesting 👌 ❤
And I thought it would be a place in Somerset near Curry Mallet, North Curry and Curry Rivel. Beer Crocombe. Oath.....
You don't even want to know what I thought a curry stool might have been.
Yes, I was thinking"I've done a few of those in my time" glad I was wrong.
You ain't the only one! 🤣🤣🤣
Learned something new today
That was short but brilliant.
Very interested to see that there's one on my home island of Jura. Will have to look for it at some point.
Fascinating stuff mate. Thanks for sharing
Such an interesting video! As for the weather, I can control the weather myself! I control the temperature by whether or not I insert the liner into my work coat...if I wait and wait to put it in, it will get cold but as soon as I put it in the weather will warm again.
Absolutely brilliant as always! Thank you for another interesting and entertaining video. Best wishes 👌🏽👍🏻👍🏻😎
Murphy's Law says it stops raining, as soon as you get your snivel gear out and wet.
Excellent video, perhaps if you had mentioned that the 60 degrees were internal angles in relation to the positioning of the measuring equipment on the trig, externally they are 120 degrees. Now I know I won’t die wondering! .
Never heard of Murphy?
01:20 😃 if we need rain here we just wash our car, works every time 😅
That's actually Quantum physics my friend a variant of the double slit / Cat
In the 1970's I was at the state capital building in Denver Colorado, and there wer several markers in the concrete to mark the "Mile High" point! Apparently elevation measurements have changed over time?
You have experienced the Mile High ? Your username makes sense now 😁
@daneenmurf1043 Allright, alright get your mind out of the cockpit!😊
@@morticiaaddams7866 Elevation levels are changing as we speak 😳
Very interesting thanks ❤
Re the rain coat, it was Murphy.
Now that was interesting in an old school sort of way!
1:06 that,'s Murphy's law I think.
Interesting, shame I'll never get to visit one as I'm at the wrong end of the UK, Seen a few Trig points about though, which I always thought the 3 sided shape on the top was for showing where three counties met, lol..😂
I think I've got a vague idea
Not the video I expected, but educational nonetheless.
Why does the trig point have to be in the middle of the marsh. Cannot they not dictate roughly it's location from the last trig point? Clearly I'm missing something. Intellect probably.
I remember commenting about these on one of your earlier videos, and you kindly replied telling me what I was remembering was a curry stool.
Regarding your list of places where the remaining 9 curry stools can be seen, I don't think I've ever been to any of those locations, so I certainly haven't seen those ones.
How certain are you that there are not more remaining?
Specifically, I remember seeing these around the Eastern coast of the Isle of sheppey in Kent (which is very boggy marshy land), and also on Frensham common in Surrey, which is a sandy heathland area.
I've not visited either area for a good 30 years, so they could very well have been removed, which would be a real shame, but I wonder if there's some online list of their remaining locations?
Thanks for the added info in this video. Presumably most of those telegraph poles (piles) would have rotted away by now, so what's supporting the concrete nowadays?
Fascinating stuff. Subscribed.
Im tempted to make a joke about the title but I guess you're all ahead of me.
Interesting video.
I went to see the Curry Stool nearest to me in Scotland. Just west of Killin Lodge near Loch Killin. Trig Pont is at top of Carn Dubh. Only shown on the 1:25000 OS map.
I just KNOW this random bit of trivia has displaced something important in my.... Damnit, i forgot.
Ishram Patel's corner café has thees instead of comfortable chairs.
How to make a fascinating little video about something that is actually rather obscure :) Well done, sir. I already think I knew about these, for which I suspect the most likely culprit of my knowledge was old school Blue Peter :D
The ground is a general description for the surface of the earth, the thing that you stand on when you walk outside. The floor is the man made surface that you stand on when you are inside a building. Many buildings have multiple floors arranged vertically.
This is my last reply on this topic.
In this case the English word Floor means the same as ground. Obviously it can mean other things - many words have many meanings, but in this case, as I said, floor = ground.
The root (etymology) of the word is from the medieval English “flor”. This is in common with many early European languages such as medieval Germanic “floruz”, middle Dutch vloer and Viking “flor”, etc. all of which refer to the surface of the Earth i.e. the Ground.
The fact that some people use the same words in (almost) the same language differently doesn’t mean that the original use and meaning is no longer valid.
So, in this specific case, the word Floor was correctly used to describe the ground level at which the Curry Stool was constructed.
Thanks for watching 😊
That was actually pretty interesting, but I admit that I'm here for the comments bahahaha.
Nah, thats lost ancient alien technology.
As soon as I heard you say let's walk up the mountain I suspected a survey reference point.
Interesting. In the US we have USGS benchmarks that serve a similar purpose. These are usually brass plates affixed to stone or some permanent surface and inscribed with pertinent information.
Ahh was gonna try and post before you said its for elevation
A: How did Map Men miss doing a story on this?
B: Fun Fact: There's a group of fun-lovers visiting each of these locations and geocaching jars of chutney. Trick is you need to match the chutney with the correct curry...
I thought that it was either a) a folding stool that you "curried" with you so you could sit down or b) a morning-after-Indian-food blowout.
😂😅😆😅🤣😂
I had the same thought as the 2nd part of your comment, but then realised there was little chance of an actual stool being found.
@@commodorenut 😁😆😅🤣😂
Fascinating. You didn’t quite get all seasons in the same day but I like the easy to put on waterproof trousers.👍🏻
"Easy to put on"? Where's the fun in that!
Can you tell us what those rain pants were? (brand model etc)
Also, are these the same as what we in Canada call a bench mark?
As i hesitantly clicked on this i thought; what the hell am doing? But I'm glad i did in the end
Did anybody notice how brave the fellah was to continue making the video while he was being hunted and stalked by sheep up on the hill?
He's lucky to be here 😂
I love curry, but I could never managed to make a stool like that.
Archimedes, ever the ladies' man, actually had a screw named after him. It was an instant hit in farming & the paradigm of irrigation. Saved many a farm hand.
Climb a mountain 😂😂😂😂 i do love your hidden jokes…. Regards from the swiss alps.❤
If i water my garden you can bet that afternoon will be rainy. One sfternoon i could see dark clouds and thought i could get away with not watering the garden. So i didnt. And it did not rain. All those dark clouds just blew away.
Fascinating stuff ! Thank you for posting . If you are interested in this sort of thing , have a look why Mount Everest is called Everest .
And why it should be called Eve - rest and not Ever - rest!
Great video, very interesting. Do you have a link for your waterproofs?
Same answer as I gave a few days ago.
Normally I tend to get Mountain Hardware or North Face but neither had my size for this year (I get a new set each year) so this year's are:
www.berghaus.com/men-s-mtn-guide-gtx-pro-jacket-red-black/13832746.html
and
www.berghaus.com/men-s-mtn-guide-gtx-pro-pant-black-red/13832753.html
I'm not suggesting what you should buy (I don't do recommendations - yeah I know, everyone else on YT does 😊) and I’m NOT any sort of commission or other benefit. Just answering a question.
@@TheMapReadingCompany thanks
The amazing history of the origins and construction of Trig points has just had another amazing fact added - ! 😊
And all done by hand; no automation involved 'cos either it hadn't been invented, or they simply couldn't get it to the locations. 😮
And on Microsoft Edge, on Windows, in UK, Bing maps has an 'show Ordnance Survey' option to help zoom into those grid references. 😇
And the Curry Stools don't always show on the maps!
You're correct. The Curry Stool in the video isn't shown on the map.
But are they usually shown?@@TheMapReadingCompany
I don't think so. The OS maps show trig points, and even though curry stools do the same job, they aren't trig points
Thanks. Wondered why I'd never seen one.@@TheMapReadingCompany
So, you’ve put the grid references in, with the expectation we might visit these structures that’s been built in the very middle of a bog! 🤦🏼
Not gonna lie but I am very unlikely to risk a thorough foot soak to see one! 🤣
But hey! Thanks this is exactly why I subscribe! Keep em coming! 😁👍👊😎
Wasn’t it Sod’s Law?😂