The Precision of Borders

"Territories allow people to be governed or taxed or imbued with loyalty by virtue of their shared spatial location, not their race or their kinship ties or their faith or their professional affiliation4." - Professor of History and Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, Charles S. Maier.

But what is the border? I'm standing out here on the A48 between Cardiff and Newport where the map tells me it should be and evidence of border actuality is pretty much nil. Somewhere behind me is a sign that greets visitors to the capital and ahead is another welcoming arrivals to Newport. Yet between them is no fence or rising barrier, no wall with a gate, no watch towers, no mesh, naught. On the map there is a faint pecked line. On the ground which the map depicts there is nothing at all.

Cities are not states, of course. With a few notable exceptions - Singapore, the Vatican, and Monaco among them - they are not semi-autonomous countries anymore. They do not own their citizens as countries might do. In the long past territories were managed by the extent the tribe could travel. Borders were flexible, porous, ever shifting, constantly affected by fire and flood. Camps might have their edges defended but they would by necessity need to be swift in shifting when under attack.

Cities, when they evolved, were the first places to introduce formal barriers to the movement of their citizens. Early examples from antiquity, Uruk, Jericho and Troy, all had watch towers, gates and walls. Attack, if it came, was by siege. Defence was through weapons deployed along the battlements, the building of castles, keeps, towers and forts. In the absence of any actual historical castles the nearest equivalent to where I'm standing today would be the St Mellon's Golf Club clubhouse with its stepped entrance porch, keg beer and bottles of IPA - but no boiling oil.

Borders for whole kingdoms, for countries, and for confederations were usually too geographically long to encourage definition through wall, ditch or palisaded bund. Although this certainly didn't stop some ancient rulers from trying. Offa, King of Mercia, built a dyke (177 miles) along the edge of his territory although there is argument as to whether it was to defend against marauding Cymric tribes or to keep the Anglo-Saxons from straying. Hadrian's Roman wall (73 miles) looks a defensive masterpiece but may well have been more a device for processing immigrants and collecting customs. The Great Wall of China stretched across an amazing 12,000 miles but was never entirely linked together and possesses a doubtful record as a defensive structure. The same fate befell France's Maginot Line (280 miles) which looked impregnable but was never tested as the invading Germans simply went around it. More recently Trump's Mexico border wall (1954 miles) failed simply by being too ambitious. Only the Soviets' Berlin Wall at 27 miles long could ever have been said to completely function as a defining and impregnable border marker. It lasted twenty-eight years from 1961 to 1989 and it kept people in just as well as it kept people out. During those years the world knew where the Russian's iron curtain with the west was situated for sure.

Cardiff's border exerts no movement control over its citizens nor over anyone else. In fact, when looked at from a geopolitical perspective it actually exerts no control at all. It is a line on a map. Before the advent of maps the location of Cardiff's borders was far less precise. But those in power always knew where they were. For a time borders were defined by the stone wall the town's citizens erected. This was barricaded with gates and lookout towers. It was centred on a great one-time Roman but now Norman castle. There were two churches inside so in the event of attack God would be on Cardiff's side. But then outer suburbs began to accumulate. Easier to get at space just beyond the walls became increasingly attractive. First Crockerton to the east and then Southey and the Moors to the south. Abandoning its built boundaries Cardiff grew larger.

Outside the readily demarcated boundaries of the early towns and cities - the curia of the Romans, the vills and manors of the feudal lords - villages, hamlets and farmsteads dotted the land. In a hierarchy of local judicial and administrative power they were grouped first into cantrefi or hundreds and those hundreds then marked out into parishes. Nomenclature shifts as you cross the land. Hundreds, wards, sokes, rapes, wapentakes, liberties. Which term you employed depended on where you were.

The parish, the most important early area division, began as a creation of the Church. Where you lived determined to which church you owed your annual tithe. This was originally a payment in support of the local clergy and was paid in kind. Following the Reformation the parish evolved to become a secular administrative unit with obligations to the poor and the ability to manage local taxation. Cardiff's earliest were the Parish of St John, surrounding the Castle, and the Parish of St Mary, covering the streets running down to the South Gate.

Since Norman times Cardiff had been managed through a grant of authority and rights known as a Charter. These documents defined the town, its laws and enactments and the rights and obligations of its citizens. The earliest extant example dates from 1147 although it is certain that other charters now lost predated this. But maps that showed the extent of the town, its parishes, structures and features and from which its citizens could determine their own responsibilities remained a thing for the future.

Prior to the Inclosure Act of 1773, and in many places for centuries after, the boundaries of a parish were ingrained into the minds of local citizens by a custom known as the beating of the bounds. This was a walking of the parish border to show where it was. By custom beating the bounds was carried out annually at rogation, three days before Ascension. In some areas, for example in Llantrisant just north of Cardiff, the practice continues today. Markers on the route, great trees, stones, hedge rows, would often be given names. Customs developed where young people or new arrivals to the district were held upside down at certain points or had their heads struck against rocks in order that they might forever remember that this was where the boundary lay.

Carved stone markers indicating parish extent can be found in many lonely places. Sandstone pillars with initials on them or with metal plates attached. Some still exist in the wild reaches of Wales but few, if any, remain inside the confines of Cardiff. The City's stone wall itself is almost entirely gone except for the run at the back of the raised flowerbed on Kingsway and the slab in the car park at the rear of Virgin Money on Queen Street. Its route is shown in the polished marble floor inside the St David's Centre shopping mall and the existence of a gate marked by coloured tiles on the floor of a Quay Street car park (see p.233 for more). Reality retreats.

The past we once shared lingers in a few other markers. The Third Marquess of Bute, who regarded archaeology as essential, was keener than most on preserving what he could. He allowed the line of the Roman Fort to be shown when he reconstructed the Castle's stone walls and kept the outline of Blackfriars Monastery in Bute Park by building low walls to run along the thresholds. The original monastery had been demolished following the reformation in 1538. The tiles and low walls on site today are probably not the originals but the shape is correct. An ancient boundary marked on the surface of the contemporary world.

At Thompson's Park in Pontcanna the land that the heir to the Spillers Milling fortune, Charles Thompson, donated to the city in 1912 was delineated by seventeen boundary stones marked with Roman numerals. These are indicated on the maps of the period. The stones still exist, ten of them. Stones I, IV, XI, XII, XVI & XVII are missing. Cardiff's earliest map was included in John Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine of 1611. This showed the town in elevation, with houses drawn in perspective and the walls, as mentioned earlier, rendered as they might have been by a child.

Borders became considerably less imprecise when maps showing the extent of a landowner's estate began to be incorporated into legal documents. Who owned what, who leased it and at what rent were of increasing importance. David Stewart's property survey carried out for landowner the Marquess of Bute in 1824 was one of the first to show a full rendering of the town border. This appears marked as 'the old wall' and runs from the castle to the canal basin wharf beyond the South Gate. Speculative surveyor and map maker Michael Spain O'Rourke's plan of the larger Cardiff of 1849 depicts the border in similar style.

It isn't until Thomas Waring's four inch to the mile plan of the town twenty years later that Parish Boundaries begin to appear. Waring was Resident Engineer for the Cardiff Sewage Works, a surveyor, and architect of, among other things, the original Guildford Crescent Baths. His plan shows not only the lines of the Parishes of St John and St Mary but the Boundary of the Parliamentary Borough of Cardiff. This line runs along the centre of the Roath Brook. Albany Road is in the heart of the burgeoning town. The great houses of Penylan Hill are cast out into the country.

Ordnance Survey began its century long mapping project for the entire of Great...