Bartsmarks mystery tour

Last Saturday I joined Nikki Pugh for a mystery tour on our bicycles. We met at Birmingham Open Media (BOM) where we are both inaugral fellows and which hosted my Bioprospecting Birmingham earlier in the year. At the exhibition Nikki spotted that we both had the same old map of Birmingham (printed by Bartholomews)- but hers had some intersting additions - some curious black blobs.

Nikki has contemplated these for some years and so we hatched a plan to make a cycling tour of a few of them (there are 140 of them spread across the city). So on Saturday we met up, along with our trusty steeds, at Kings Norton Junction on the canal and set off to examine the location of 14 of them. Our route was only 15miles or so but it took us most of the day stopping and puzzling at each location, and also enlisting willing passers-by for their views as to the origin of the blobs.

At each location I took a Sphere photo to see if we could document the area and potential spot the similarities. Thats what you can see below once they've been liniarized. All suggestions are welcome! Our passers-by were going for pubs though this didn't pan out as some of the blobs are on Cadbury Quaker land with its ban on pubs and we had the suggestion through Twitter that they could be from water pumps, which are no longer there!

The National Library of Scotland website has access to some great old maps - if you find anything let us know! The order from the top is:
1. Us looking at the map at Kings Norton Junction (there was no blob here but there was for the rest of these locations),
2. Junction of Station Road and Camp Land, Kings Norton
3. Woodland Lane near Pine Walk, Northfield,
4. Junction of Hole Lane and Heath Road, Northfield,
5. Fordhouse Lane near Beilby Road, Stirchley,
6. Junction of Hallam street and Willows Road, Edgbaston,
7. Junction of Mary Street and Edward Road, Edgbaston,
8. Junction of Sir John's ROad and Pershore Road, Selly Park.