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Great Britian (GBR) Counties and Region (State) updated polygons #839

Description

@stoppie777

Current State

The polygons currently available in OSAK which I assume were derived from GSAK, are well out of date. Some of the Counties have not existed since 1996!

There are 65 counties and 14 States in OSAK currently . There are actually 102 Counties and 14 States, but some States have been renamed or have had boundary changes.

Proposed Improvement

New versions of the GBR polygons are available here: https://github.com/stoppie777/GBR_Polygons

### Scope

This data covers Great Britain only:

England
Scotland
Wales

It does not cover the full United Kingdom as it does not include Northern Ireland. NI is included in EIRE by Groundspeak and Project-GC.

### Source and alignment

The boundaries are derived from OpenStreetMap data and are aligned to the county and region boundaries currently used by Project-GC.

The data is prepared in QGIS using GeoPackage source layers, with coastline boundaries extended and smoothed where necessary to capture offshore and near-coastal cache locations more reliably.

### Data included

This repository contains:

County GeoJSON outputs
Region GeoJSON outputs
GSAK-compatible county text polygon files
GSAK-compatible region text polygon files
OSM mapping reference for county-to-region relationships

A merged Great Britain county GeoJSON is kept locally for internal use and can be made available on request.

### Important note on simplification

This initial version is intentionally not simplified.

County boundaries are kept at their full authoritative geometry, with no generalisation or smoothing applied beyond the coastline adjustments noted above. This keeps the dataset suitable for precise boundary matching and accurate polygon-based lookups.

Expected Benefits

Geocache data would be able to have the up-to-date County and Region applied to them and this would align with the same information that is available currently in Project-GC.

Activity

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