Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Island

  • Highpoints of the Crown Dependencies

    How does one refer to the Bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey, and the Isle of Man collectively? I pondered the British Isles Euler diagram and didn’t see a specific designation. “Outlying British Islands” seemed like a possibility although I didn’t want to diminish their significance. I think “Crown Dependencies” covers the three, and only those…

  • Life is Hard

    Did anyone else notice the oddly-named park immediately to the east of Social Circle, Georgia when I posted The Chunk that Got Away in December? Well, I did. And I made a record of it intending to return later. Hard Labor Creek had to have a story. Places like that don’t get their names accidentally.…

  • US State Surnames

    The second installment on surnames involves instances that match U.S. state names. The rules are much the same as the national surnames discussion. The source remains Frequently Occurring Surnames from Census 2000 and complete matches are better than partial matches. Once again one should feel free to follow along at home using a shared Google…

  • Chincoteague and Assateague

    The dirty little secret of the geo-oddities blogger community is that there’s only so much geographic weirdness to go around. We all tend to overlap with our material from time-to-time, and that’s fine. We each apply our own spin on a common set facts to develop something original and creative. I’d been trying to think…

  • Ferry from Maryland to Virginia

    It’s time to provide another Public Service Announcement. These are Twelve Mile Circle articles that answer burning questions from one-time visitors in the general public that may not appeal to the regular audience. I’ll talk about maps, transportation and a little about history that may interest a localized segment of readers. Feel free to continue…

  • Odds and Ends 5

    It’s been a long time since I’ve posted an “Odds and Ends” compilation. That’s where I combine lots of minor yet noteworthy topics that don’t provide enough material to stand on their own into one completely disjointed article. Frankly a lot of these miscellaneous topics have been going onto my social media sites lately so…

  • Ancient Trust

    I seem to have a little bit of a river island fixation going on recently. I started with Green River Island and now I’m featuring Burlington Island (map). Even so, I think it’s probably just these two articles, a coincidence actually. Burlington doesn’t have quite the pedigree of a Supreme Court decision like Green River…

  • Green River Island

    Green River Island is one of those places that seems to belong to the wrong state. In this instance it feels like it should be part of Indiana but it’s actually part of Kentucky. It hardly seems like an island either although vestiges of its old topography continue to remain visible. Rather, the “island” has…

  • Named for Captain Cook

    This isn’t intended as a biography of Captain James Cook although his voyages throughout the South Pacific and beyond were numerous and legendary. Rather this is about places named for Captain Cook, strewn about the waters in which he sailed and the shorelines that he charted. He has an entire society named for him if…

  • Connecticut Extremes: Are We There Yet?

    It’s been a protracted series of Extreme Connecticut geography articles and you’re probably growing a little weary of them by now. I was in a similar position somewhere around this same point during our long and busy adventure. Nonetheless, nobody had ever visited the state’s four cardinal extremities in a single day before. We were…