Chains and furlongs

 

Chains and furlongs

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The broken links mentioned in my recent post led me to thinking about chains and furlongs. I knew chains were a form of measuring length, and anyone who has ever watched a horse race or heard a racing commentary will have heard of furlongs. All well and good, but what exactly are chains and furlongs?

In 1620 an English mathematician called Edmund Gunter devised a measuring gadget called a chain, which was used to survey land accurately. It replaced earlier chains and was standardized.

It was 66 feet long and comprised 100 thick wire links with a loop at each end. The loops were joined by a ring, giving the appearance of three rings. At each end of the chain were brass handles.

There are 4 rods in a chain, each rod being 16.5 feet. The rod was also known as a perch or pole and was an old English measure of distance. Before it was standardized to become exactly one quarter of a chain, it could measure anything from 9 to 28 feet. Since 1965 it has no longer been used as a legal unit of measurement.

Chains are still used in agriculture in the form of measuring wheels.

 A furlong was used originally to define the length of a furrow in a ploughed field and was the distance a team of oxen could work without resting. That was standardised to be 40 rods or 10 chains or 660 feet, the equivalent of one-eighth of a mile.

There are 80 chains to the mile. Until the nineteenth century Scottish and Irish miles were longer because their chains differed in length. A Scottish chain was 74 feet and an Irish one was 84 feet. In 1824 they had to conform to English standards when imperial units were adopted.

 A country mile is a different beast altogether . . .