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Beating the Bounds:
Perambulation of Boundary of Mitcham, 1833
Local History Notes 26: ed. E N Montague
On Thursday 16 May 1833, led by the village band, a party of Mitcham parish officials, accompanied by old men who claimed to remember the boundary marks from their childhood, and boys upon whom reliance would be placed in years to come, walked the boundaries of the parish.
By good fortune a detailed account by Edwin Chart of this perambulation, conducted with all due ceremony, has survived (in transcription), and we can still attempt to follow the route taken.
Chart's manuscript was last seen soon after the London Borough of Merton came into existence in 1965. It was kept at the former Town Hall of Wimbledon, where it was in the custody of the Town Clerk's department. Its present location is unknown. Fortunately a transcript was made, and it is this, reproduced verbatim, that is offered here to a wider readership.
There are a number of places in Chart's narrative where sentences begin with a lower-case letter, and other occasions where a sentence runs on for a whole paragraph. No attempt has been made to 'correct' the punctuation, though some paragraphs have been split into more manageable chunks.
Footnotes have been kept to a minimum, and explanatory text has mostly been confined to the captions of photographs and maps. Wherever possible, early 19th-century maps have been used to illustrate the route taken, but an extract from a 6-inch OS map of 1865 has been used where earlier maps do not survive.
Extract from the Introduction
