North of this line, parishes tended on the whole to be large, containing several townships. The local historian Dorothy Silvester has identified a "parish line", which divided northern from southern counties of England and Wales ( Denbighshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, and northern Yorkshire). Sometimes, one township included parts of several different parishes, as in Heworth near York, which included parts of the parishes of St Saviour, St Cuthbert and St Giles.There or elsewhere, occasionally, different parts of a parish were in different hundreds or counties.Whalley parish, in Lancashire, contained 47 townships and extended over 43,000 ha (105,000 ac). For example, Sheffield constituted a single parish, which had six townships in it - Ecclesall Bierlow, Brightside Bierlow, Attercliffe cum Darnall, Nether Hallam, Upper Hallam, and Sheffield itself. In some parts of Northern England, the parishes were too large to be managed conveniently.
However, in some cases, particularly in Northern England, there was a lesser unit called a township, being a subdivision of a parish. In many areas of England, the basic unit of civil administration was the parish, generally identical with the ecclesiastical parish. The marker has been restored for historical purposes. History Township boundary marker at Mungrisdale, Cumbria. 'Township' is, however, sometimes used loosely for any of the above. Tithing: the basic unit of the medieval Frankpledge system.