Square Perch

The square of a perch of 16½ feet, being 30¼ square yards. Forty square perches make one rood.

Traditional British land was recorded in acres, roods and perches, written in that order: a plot described as 3-2-15 held three acres, two roods and fifteen perches. The square perch was the finest of the three, small enough to record cottage gardens and allotment strips precisely, and it appears throughout tithe maps, enclosure awards and older property deeds. It survives in one place in daily use: allotments are still measured in rods, the ten-rod plot being the traditional standard, which means several hundred thousand people in Britain hold land measured in a unit their deeds would otherwise never mention. Note also that the Channel Islands use the word perch for a different area entirely, a fortieth of a vergée, at roughly 44.7 square metres in Jersey.