Talk:Blackdown Hills

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Blackdown Hills/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Starting review. Pyrotec (talk) 14:13, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Initial skim through

Looks good so far. Quite a few red-line locations; and the in-line citations sparse in some sub-sections.Pyrotec (talk) 14:45, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

GA nomination – on hold

Article is substantially compliant but there are a few areas needing attention, mostly the need for citations. Points needing attention are:

• History section: what appears to be an unfinished sentence regarding Annales Cambriae.

• Geography section. No reference to support statement referring to water extraction from the Otter valley.

• Climate section. Mostly unreferenced, however ref 11 is a "home page" and its sub-pages could provide referencing for possibly all the statements made in these two paragraphs.

• Geology: both references 5 & 6 are long, could page numbers be provided?
• Ecology, first sentence is unreferenced, but possibly ref 6, which appears later, also supports the first sentence.

• History. Middle ages iron working at Hemyock unreferenced. Chain of Elizabethan beacons unreferenced. Ditto wool and yarn production at Cold Harbour; Robert Polhill Bevan; and RAF bases (but I can fix this one tonight).

• Government and Politics: no ref for AONB, but this is covered elsewhere so the ref can be reused.

Overall a good article.Pyrotec (talk) 16:42, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Comments from Malleus Fatuorum

• I'm uncertain that this article is correct in generally considering the Blackdown Hills to be plural, as in "The Blackdown Hills are a sparsely populated area". The lead tells us that it is the name of a range of hills, which would surely make it singular?

• This sentence doesn't make sense: "River valleys cut into the landscape which together support an extensive range of wildlife leading to the designation of 16 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs)."

• Points of the compass are not given consistently: "unique in south west England .."; "The predominant wind direction is from the south-west."

• It should be consistently "Iron Age", not "iron age".

--Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 17:21, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Response to comments. Thank you both for your comments which have helped to improve the article. I believe all issues raised above have been dealt with except the singular v plural concern. Looking at Quantock Hills which is already a GA and a close neighbour with similar characteristics, the range of hills is described in the plural - but I am willing to bow to expertise on which is correct. Please let me know of any further areas which you feel need improvement.— Rod ^talk 20:27, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

GA

Congratulations and thanks for all your hard work. I've now assessed the article as GA class. Pyrotec (talk) 18:43, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Transport

We've covered roads, presumably we can say that there aren't any other forms of transport, like railways or canals, passing through?Pyrotec (talk) 16:48, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't know of/can't find any evidence of others - apart from the airfield mentioned in the section above.— Rod ^talk 17:22, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

I've added the Grand Western Canal and the Reading to Plymouth Line, as a point of info, as they are both near to the M5 motorway. However, I've just discovered the Culm Valley Light Railway, its not needed for the GAR, but it (or its remains) may lie within the AONB. Pyrotec (talk) 20:25, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

You are right it does cross the hills & should be included.— Rod ^talk 20:29, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Blackdown Hills - plural

The Rocky Mountains, Mendip Hills, Chiltern Hills, Pennines, South Downs etc. are all referred to as plural in their respective articles. Cannot see why these should be different - despite what is said in the GA comments. --TimTay (talk) 20:57, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Depends on how the "Blackdown Hills" is defined. Nothing to do with the Rocky Mountains or anywhere else. Blackdown Hills is defined as a range in the lead. Is there some doubt that "range" is singular? --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 21:52, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

They are hills which form a range, just as the Rocky Mountains are: "The Rocky Mountains ... are a broad mountain range ..." from its lead. The only case where I could imagine "The X Hills" or being treated as a singular entity is where it is the name of a local authority district, like "Tower Hamlets". PamD (talk) 23:01, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

I find the singular awkward. It's theoretically possible, but unusual. There's a little scope in English to emphasise the parts ("the crowd applaud") or the whole ("the crowd applauds"). I suspect that the plural is usual for these Hills. Tony (talk) 01:56, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Consider this snipit from the web:

3. Subject-verb Agreement
Subject-verb AGREEMENT or CONCORD relates to number
agreement (singular or plural) between the Subject
and the verb which follows it:  {{bquote|
...
 The government is considering the proposal
 The government are considering the proposal

Here, the form of the verb is not determined by the form of the Subject.
Instead, it is determined by how we interpret the Subject. In "the 
government is...", the Subject is interpreted as a unit, requiring
a singular form of the verb. In "the government are...", the Subject
is interpreted as having a plural meaning, since it relates to a 
collection of individual people. Accordingly, the verb has the plural
form are.

--Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 16:09, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

That appears to me to be nonsense. How we interpret the subject determines whether it is singular or plural; the form of the verb then matches that interpretation. I've got no strong feelings either way, but I do find inconsistencies such as: "The Blackdown Hills are a range of hills along the Somerset-Devon border in south-western England. It was designated ..." to be jarring. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 18:37, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Presumably one of the sources of confusion is that the AONB is always singular. Are we clear, in each instance, whether we are talking about the hills in general, or the precisely-delimited AONB? almost-instinct 18:50, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Not having read this talk page, I baulked at the opening sentence in the main article - the use of singular or plural was the problem, which has already been discussed. BUT... in any case, I question that the Blackdown Hills is (or are) a RANGE of hills - they are not a 'line or series', which is an OED definition of 'range' of hills. Is there a single-word definition of plateaux with promontories and deep valleys? Tony in Devon (talk) 11:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

What else is needed to get this article to FA

This article has now been a fairly stable Good Article for over a year and I am looking for ideas about what would be needed to get it to meet the Wikipedia:Featured article criteria? This is one part of the Featured topic about Physical geography of Somerset. The rules about FT's have changed and we need to get one of the GAs included in the topic up to FA status or the whole FT will be demoted to a Good topic. Any ideas appreciated.— Rod ^talk 20:59, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Reversion of Geodesy addition

I recently reverted a good faith edit to this article but my edit summary didn't properly explain why. The addition said "The Hardy Monument near Portisham in the Blackdown Hills was the origin (meridian) for the 6 inch and 1:2500 Ordnance Survey maps for Somerset and Dorset". I believe the site being referred to is at the Hardy Monument, Portesham on Black Down, Dorset rather than the Blackdown Hills described in this article. It can be confusing as there is another Black Down, Somerset not that far away.— Rod ^talk 08:56, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Blackdown Hills/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

B - Great! The lead has been expanded and tidied a little bit by myself. Towards GA class the article needs rewording throughout. There are many one line paragraphs, which could be merged. Maybe an expert on prose could help out. Meaty♠Weenies (talk) 13:08, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Last edited at 18:04, 29 May 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 09:47, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

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Requested move 6 July 2024

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Blackdown Hills National Landscape → Blackdown Hills – The article was renamed from "Blackdown Hills" to "Blackdown Hills National Landscape" earlier this year by Mark999 (talk · contribs), along with several others, at least one of which has since been reverted (North Wessex Downs). Unfortunately it seems I can't just revert this change, because the redirect has since been modified, so I'm going to have to do a requested move.

There are a couple of problems with this move:

1. This article has always been about a range of hills that is a National Landscape (or AONB as was). The move has turned this into an article about a National Landscape that contains some hills. Except that in reality the majority of the article is still about a range of hills, the Blackdown Hills, that have existed long before they were designated as a National Landscape. The crucial difference can be seen in the fact that the standfirst sentence of this article no longer makes any sense. At the start of this year it read: "The Blackdown Hills are a range of hills along the Somerset-Devon border in south-western England, which were designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in 1991." Now it reads "The Blackdown Hills National Landscape is a National Landscape along the Somerset-Devon border in south-western England, which were designated in 1991 as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB)." This is especially a problem for this article, which reached "Good article" status having explicitly addressed the issue of it needing to be very clear about the difference.
2. WP:CONCISE: there are no other Blackdown Hills articles, there is no need to disambiguate this one or make it more complex than it needs to be.

The argument for naming it "Blackdown Hills National Landscape" appears to be that this is an 'official' name, but (a) that argument only holds if this article is purely about the National Landscape conservation designation area, and not more broadly about a range of hills which still are simply called the "Blackdown Hills", and (b) that wouldn't trump the CONCISE guideline. We don't name of the Lake District article "Lake District National Park". Joe D (t) 17:28, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nom. Clear common name. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:29, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
• Support move back to stable, concise, common name. Dekimasuよ! 02:44, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.