Planning Hawes

Lets slowly plan a village -

We need to see what the geographical layout is to spot the major problems. Rivers, roads, terrain, size.

We want some boundaries to the project. we will start by looking at the parish boundary to see has a suitable perimeter and at adjacent parishes in case their needs should be taken into account

We want to know how this will connect to B4RN. Hyperfast Dentdale have already crossed into Hawes parish in the SouthWest and are about to get houses connected there. Garsdale B4RN are planned to reach another part of Hawes' boundary on the West.

Your very first sketch

You notice

The parish to the north there looks as though its houses are close to Hawes, does that need to be included? It's called High Abbotside
There seems to be only one river to consider, and maybe two tributaries
The two B4RN routes lead nicely in and the network would benefit from them linking

You look up the population of Hawes parish - 1138

and High Abbotside 210

compared to Dentdale 785 Ingleton 3803

Check the bigger map - the Pennines stretch south and north from here with no villages. B4RN are already on the west, so any future development of the network would be due East

Let's keep gathering data. What does the middle of Hawes look like?

Well there are key fields, but it looks like most places are close to grass. The old railway looks interesting. There's that patch in the middle of the one-way system looks the trickiest. And that looks like a proper river.

Quick look on Streetview at the river. It's a bit big, but it has got a few bridges. And the water is a bit brown, it looks as though the river is not usually this high.

Okay it looks as do-able as anywhere else. But a bit complicated from your armchair, so let's approach the problem from a different angle. We have B4RN connection at the top of Widdale, now would we extend that? Let's look at a map of that end of Widdale, that's the section that gets us halfway to Hawes.

You can look at the map, you can drive down the road in Streetview, you can look up all the houses that pay rates. So you can get a start on identifying all the houses. Eventually you would drive it and ask some locals, for now let's say this is close.

A string of Houses down the road from the purple house that has B4RN and houses down the other road (a dead end)

You are already thinking of this as your plan. You need 24 fibres to go to Dent for network reasons and you have too many houses there to do all of them, the obvious solution is to have the network split at the road junction there. So a chamber there.

It's about 3.4 kilometres, so we are thinking of 3 intermediate chambers.

That's all you need for a plan for now, you don't need a spreadsheet or a Google Earth map. They are all pretty much on the same side of the road. Your next task is to find out exactly how many properties there are to that junction and see how they relate to that river - are they on the road side or hill side? And are there restricted options as to where to cross the river to them? Are the houses inhabited or ruins?

So, without leaving your armchair you have a map you could send to the Hawes Champion to work with.

He opens it and shows it to one of the farmers and they both say that it doesn't make sense, it should go that way.

Your starter map is a starter map, but it often gets unfair criticism. This also shows you how much you change it, you can change it a lot.

The only rules are join that lot together by the easiest-to-dig total distance of lines, subject no inter-chamber distance being much over 1000m and the two end points are fairly fixed.

Note - The chamber distance in the middle there is a bit long

Note - It would be straightest just to go direct between the houses, but to begin with it seems much better going away from the river.

You go and see the farmer who lives at DD424, he has already said he is willing to do moleploughing down the valley, he owns big chunks of it. You don't arrange a meeting, you just find him.

You have a 10 minute conversation.

You get the low-down on each property - "that one's a ruin", "that one's a holiday home", "dunno about them", "they'll be interested", etc".
You get some idea of obstacles - "what's the river like to dig through?","any good ways under the road?", "any gullies to cross?", "any other obstacles?"
You ask which bits he owns and what the other landowners are like - "he'll be all right", "they'll be all right", " he could be a bit er well.... but if he is, we could always go that way"
And ask "Were you thinking about this year or next year? to which you get the "maybe next year" vibe.

That's all your real conversation. (Generally you may have to tack on some conversation about farming, the weather, or how it was back in the day, during which you will be largely a super-interested listener)

You have a quick drive down the valley to get the feel. It feels big, a bit lumpy and has very tough-looking grass.

What did you learn?

The first two properties are probably not interested (the first one is farmed but uninhabited), so a linking route through the houses doesn't make sense - you will have a route somehow down the road. And probably not have to put these 2 spurs in, just put a chamber in a sensible place to start from if necessary in the future.
The river starts getting a bit big further down. You might cross it higher up, but further down you will be using bridges.
And one of the buildings you saw on the map is just a barn, but in very good condition, so it probably needs to be planned as a connection, but not laid.
The best thing you learned is that you do not appear to have any landowner problems. Must ask if there is a friendly route all the way to Hawes rather than finding out you have a 'block' where someone bars the whole way in.

Plotting everything that looks like a dwelling to the west of Hawes gives you a map like that. The 2 red arrows will be the feeds from Dentdale and Garsdale. The red pins are houses, the orange pins are clusters of houses

That immediately suggests some sort of network diagram like this

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