Richard Wilson's excellent new Atlas of Spiders and Harvestmen of Yorkshire, covering 430 species and celebrating Clifford Smith's pioneering 1982 atlas for the county, is now available at a pre-publication price of £25 + £4.50 p&p (saving £10) via https://bit.ly/Yorkshire_Spider_Atlas until 1st October 2025.
Nearly 45 years ago, a retired schoolmaster, Clifford Smith, painstakingly produced and privately published the first county atlas of spiders. His An Atlas of Yorkshire Spiders (1982) was pioneering. Previous efforts had located Britain’s spiders to county only, listed by Bristowe in 1939 and mapped by Locket, Millidge & Merrett in1974. Thus, a single specimen of a new species recorded in the historic county of Yorkshire (five vice-counties, VC61-VC65) would have instantly ‘filled in’ about 7% of Britain. Clifford mapped on a hectad basis, laboriously stencilling dots onto a Yorkshire template. In doing so, he enabled some species to be associated with broad habitats, such as the Pennine uplands or the lowland heaths.
Richard Wilson, SRS Area Organiser for all Yorkshire vice-counties, is now celebrating and extending this seminal work with the publication of his Spiders and Harvestmen of Yorkshire. Smith mapped 375 spider species, but in Wilson’s book this has increased to 430, starkly illustrating recent changes in our arachno-fauna, as new species arrive and establish in Britain, and existing species spread northwards with a warming climate. The new Atlas maps records for three time periods and, for some purposes, at tetrad resolution. Much of the book, of course, comprises species maps, but the real innovations include detailed analyses of Yorkshire’s varied landscapes and habitats and their associated arachno-faunas, an assessment for the first time of species’ rarity and threat status in the county, as well as fascinating pen portraits of Yorkshire’s arachnologists, the people behind the ‘dots’, both past and present.