80 rods (traditionally) in a roll of barbed wire, which is also 1320 ft (1/4 mile).
Just be glad ya never had to build a fence off a survey that was in Spanish Varas. I did. Varas differed greatly depending where you were located even in the US Southwest, but in Texas, as late as 1919, the official length of a Vara (by law) was 33 1/3 inches per Vara. The US supreme court in 1870 got involved because of the immense size of many of the properties in NM, Ariz and Calif that becaume US property after the Mexican/American war and ruled that all Varas in the US would be pegged to the Texas Vara and that too caused a lot of grief and more than one gunfight and range war broke out because the ruling meant some older families lost land as they were originally laid out by the old Mexican Vara which was larger/longer than the Texas Vara.. When your ranch is many thousands of (sq acres) the inches add up..
There all kinds of smaller measurements within the Vara, and most are related to the width or length of a finger.
A Vara is not just the word for a length, it's also the term for the length of wood or iron that is used to measure the Vara. Mexican varas are graduated in tenths on one side. One of the tenths is subdivided into 10 centesimos (hundredths), and one centesimo is further subdivided into 10 thousandths. The other side shows division of the vara into one-half, one-third, one-fourth, one-sixth and one-eighth. The one-sixth section is divided into "pulgadas" (Spanish inches). Pulgar is the word for "thumb" in Spanish, and thus the inch roughly corresponds to the length of the first thumb bone.
There is another finger-derived gradation as well. The varas are also divided into "dedos," a unit I had never heard of before, which means "fingers." A dedo is a "standard fingerwidth"; one vara equals 48 dedos. This means that a dedo is approximately 17.45 millimeters or (0.69 inch).
Now you know more about Varas than you probably ever wanted to know.
