How many shires are there in uk

The British counties are the oldest extant national divisions in the world. Where a distinction has to be made with statutory "counties" so called for administrative purposes, the counties are variously known as historic counties , traditional counties or ancient or geographical counties [1].

The counties have no administrative function, existing as geographical and cultural areas. Most of the counties have an existence stretching back to the Middle Ages and almost all of the English counties have been established for over a thousand years.

In this time many activities many activities and much social understanding and local identity has grown up intertwined with the counties, and so they have become a vital part of British and Irish culture. Until the late twentieth century, administrative functions were carried out by bodies using the counties' boundaries or approximations to them, and so centuries of public records have been organised county by county, for which reason an understanding of the counties is vital for genealogical and historic research.

County towns are listed first and cities are shown in bold. Jump to: navigation , search. I , 2 April Category : Counties. Navigation menu Personal tools Create account Log in.

Namespaces Page Discussion. Views Read View source View history. This page was last modified on 27 December , at The source of the names of most of those modern counties are pretty obvious.

They were named after cities Greater London , Greater Manchester , latterly Bristol , or rivers Avon , plus several of the above , or bits of counties South Yorkshire , West Yorkshire , North Yorkshire , East Riding of Yorkshire , and in one case a vague geographic region just to get out of using any name that might annoy the locals West Midlands.

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Anyway, I decided to find out. Privacy Policy. More on the UK How to crash the housing market. Facial recognition in schools is here: Are we ready for it? The building blocks of net-zero homes. England, as well as being divide into counties, is also broken up into regions. Yorkshire is the largest traditional county of England. North Yorkshire is still Englands Largest county after the split in It covers square miles.

Rutland is traditionally England's smallest county. More information on the counties includes photos www.