Re: How long is a Chain?

[John Cleverdon <johnc@cdi.com.au>]

Bill wrote:

> <snip>
>
> It is often useful to be able to convert areas too:
>
> The old quarter acre section is about 1000 sq metres, so an acre is about 4000
> sq. m., and the hectare is about 2.5 acres (2.471054 to be fairly exact!). Not
> quite so easy in the house: It takes almost 11 sq ft to make 1 sq metre (for
> those quick at approximations, a 2% correction is worthwhile because the
> correct figure is 10.7639 rather than 11). Thus a fairly standard sort of 1500
> sq ft basic house is fairly close to 136 sq m - add 2% of that amount and you
> are close to 140 sq m. Of course the Aussies use "squares" as a unit of area,
> and that is a little over 9 sq metres. So a house of 15 squares is a bit over
> 135 sq m. 135, 140, there is only about 3.7% difference between them.........
>

To be exact, one acre is 10,000 square links. Thus, the quarte-acre block (that I
have often seen on the titles I process) is generally 250x100 links, or approx
50x20 metres. This gives the roughly 1000 sq metres mentioned above.
To make it even more confusing, there are also roods and perches as well as acres.
There are 4 roods in an acre and 40 perches in a rood. Titles often inlcude areas
in tenths of a perch