ArcGIS shapefile of 788 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 32 ancient counties of Scotland as given in the 1851 census. As such this represents the counties of Scotland as they were before the boundary changes caused by Inverness and Elgin County Boundaries Act, 1870 (33 & 34 Vict. c. 16) and the Local Government (Scotland) Act, 1889 (52 & 53 Vict. c. 50) which eliminated the anomalies caused by the existence of detached portions of counties. These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

These data were digitized from digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina. The boundary data requires no further comment except to note that the coastline was digitised to the high water mark of ordinary spring tides. The initial digitization was carried out by Owen Tucker of the Cartographic Unit of the Department of Geography under the supervision of Max Satchell. Following invaluable input from Corinne Roughley and Michael Anderson - especially the latter's extraordinary knowledge concerning the population geography of Scottish islands - further revisions and edits were the work of Max Satchell and Philip Stickler of the Cartographic Unit. Users should be aware that recent checks have found some discrepancies among the very small islands of this dataset, so it should be regarded as a beta version on which minor corrections remain to be made.