Use this page to determine the vice-county for a OSGB or IE grid reference.
Elevations above sea-level in metres are also provided for GB locations.
For shorter grid references, the bottom left-hand corner of the area is looked up.
Note that grid references in the sea close to land will not usually return a valid vice-county.
Spaces or dots in the grid reference are removed.
| Grid reference: | |
|---|---|
| Vice-county: | |
| Vice-county name: | |
| Elevation: |
All vice-county API requests are logged temporarily, with no accompanying personal/source data.
This tool uses vice-county boundary and elevation information from these sources, thanks:
An API is available here, passing a "gr" GET parameter: https://alpicola.co.uk/api/getvicecounty
If successful, the API returns JSON with "success" true along with "vcno", "vcname" and "served" properties, and possibly "elevation" as an integer.
{
"success":true
"served":"Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:38:14 GMT",
"vcno":"H21",
"vcname":"H21 Dublin"
}
In unsuccessful, "success" will be false and "err" will be set, eg:
{"success":false,"served":"Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:40:02 GMT","err":"Invalid grid reference"}
The OS Terrain 50 information contains spot heights above sea level in a grid at 50m horizontal intervals across all GB. These heights are provided with one decimal figure accuracy but these are rounded for storage eg 701.6 is stored as 702, 34.3 is stored as 34, and -3.4 is stored as -3. The elevation for a particular grid reference is worked out where possible using approximate interpolation between the four nearest spot heights. Cases where the gridref is obviously in the sea return no value.