1.8 Town Field

In the land register, all towns are indexed. There can be confusion around what constitutes a locality and what constitutes a town. There are precise guidelines in existence, and these can be found at Localities and Post Towns in Scotland. This list contains the hamlets, villages and towns in Scotland and should be used to establish if a place should be entered as a locality or a town. If the list indicates the place is a postal town, then this should be indexed in the town field.

When indexing an address on the LRS and only a locality has been given in the application, then this should be indexed in the locality field with the corresponding post town taken from the list being indexed in the town field. If there are several entries for the locality (each with a different post town), attention should be paid to the county to help determine which post town should be entered.

Hints and Tips

• As with all address information, care should be taken that the correct punctuation is used, particularly in examples such as St. Andrews, Bo'ness and Newport-on-Tay.
• For islands that are included on the list as postal towns, these should be shown in full when indexing, for example, Isle of Mull. The list should be checked for each island as there are a small number of exceptions to this rule, for example, Isle of Scalpay is a Locality with Isle of Skye as the post town.