Research further north confirms this. Mere Syke Close, adjacent to Cant Beck, indicates boundary continuity through to the later period with the element mere 'boundary'. The case for Geographical Information. Donald J Morse, Edinburgh University Data Library. Basically, a GIS handles spatially-related data as a series of transparent layers.
Attributes attach to points, arcs, polygons, and raster images.
They relate information about the objects which these features represent. E.g. the number of inhabited houses enumerated in Forgandenny in 1871, was 151, while the number of males enumerated in Kinross in the same year was 2,328. And all of these problems tend to be more pronounced the older the source material. Because of this, the measurement of change over time is usually more intractable than any other problem. When it comes to digitisation, you cannot do better in terms of scale than that used by the original source.