Not very highly ranked

According to the website Trigpointing UK, the trig point on Steventon Hill is ranked 10, 197th of all the trig points in the United Kingdom judged on the basis of location, views, accessibility and condition. This is according to the contributors to this website, 44 of whom have visited the site and scored it an average of 5.16 out of ten for its various merits. Those of us from the village who enjoy walking past it would probably rate it much higher than this, for it affords wonderful views across the Vale, on a clear day, reaching to the Cotswolds.

Who chose this spot for a trig point?

The answer to that is a Captain Ferrier and Captain Archer of The Royal Engineers, who set up their theodolite here in 1875 as part of their survey of north Berkshire. They were undertaking the ground work for the first series of Ordnance Survey maps covering all of the British Isles. The view from this point was sufficiently airy to allow accurate sightings of other prominent features in the landscape, such as the spire of St Helen’s church, Abingdon; Boars Hill and Faringdon Hill. Using trigonometry, distances could be calculated from these known points.

A spiders web of details

In this way, the two soldiers created the spider’s web of triangles that would allow them to plot the precise position of every man-made and natural feature of any kind that appeared in the landscape. Every single detail of the landscape was recorded, from houses down to the individual stones marking field boundaries.

A Gunter Chain

This was achieved by a team of a dozen men, usually civilians, dragging around a Gunter chain, which was the device used for the measuring of distances between triangulation points and landscape features.

A laborious process

The chain was named after its inventor, Edmund Gunter 17th century mathematician and clergyman. It became the international standard of measurement of The British Empire and comprised a chain of a 100 links that was 66 feet in length. The chain would be laid across the ground with one end at a point already known in terms of location and the other end aligned exactly with the target feature. This end would be spiked into the ground, and then the entire length of the chain rotated around the spike to continue the next 66 feet towards the objective. In the year 1875, there wasn’t another person alive who knew more about the land around Steventon than Captains Ferrier and Archer and their Gunter chain team