Some of my family were stock farmers in Australia and talked about 10, 5, 3 and 2 chain roads a bit too when talking about driving routes between places in rural and forested regions. You’d know the (maybe abandoned or ruined versus still existing small settlement) destination - by the description of the width of the roads getting there.

I’m not sure how much of this was connected to what seemed to be a multi-generational familial problem recalling proper nouns.

As someone who didn’t grow up there it was a bit different to what I was used to - named roads or road numbers, named settlements or geographic identifiers.

The chain makes more sense as being one tenth of a furlong (as still used in horse racing in the US, Great Britain and Ireland!), which is of course one eighth of a mile.

Also, an acre is one furlong long by one chain wide.

Not coincidentally, a cricket pitch is one chain long.

My education was almost all in the metric system but a decent knowledge of the imperial system still makes the world a bit easier to understand.

Friends father did the forestry course in edinburgh during ww2: it was held to be sufficiently important it was a reserved occupation (not subject to the draft)

On graduation and inevitable employment by the forestry commission you got your chain: a vital tool of the job, as well as useful for marking out cricket pitches. (They are one chain long)