Category: United Kingdom

  • It’s Electric

    I have multiple interests that occasionally bleed over the borders of Twelve Mile Circle where they happen to merge with geography. That often includes an historical context that strays into more personal history in the form of genealogy. I’ve spent a lot of my free time on genealogy lately as I prepare for the public…

  • Things I Wonder

    I maintain a long list of potential topics on a spreadsheet and currently it stretches several hundred rows. Some of my story ideas remain on the sheet for months or years. That’s because they must have been interesting enough to record but not substantial enough to create a standalone article. Let me winnow down the…

  • Runaway Truck!

    I went on a brief roadtrip last Autumn, an experience I described in more detail in my Adventures along Maryland I-70/68. In that article I mentioned a massive road cut at Sideling Hill. However, I couldn’t find a reason to highlight another feature, a runaway truck ramp just west of the cut as one descends…

  • Numerical Place Names

    I wondered if I could find any place names composed entirely of numbers. Thus, while communities such as Thousand Oaks and Twentynine Palms in California were interesting in a sense, they wouldn’t do for my purpose. I wanted to find places that transcended the precision of a description to reach entirely higher circles of absurdity.…

  • No, Not That One

    I was trying to find something on Buffalo, New York. I can’t remember what it was exactly, although that’s not actually important to the discussion. However, a random search led me to another Buffalo, a town with the same name in Wyoming. I considered it rather odd. When one thinks of Buffalo as a city,…

  • Sundog

    I mentioned Goldfield, Nevada recently. There I noticed a street called Sundog Avenue that looked like the kind of place where one could experience a sundog in person. Then I tucked the thought away for a few days until I had more time to explore it. A sundog describes a specific atmospheric condition that allows…

  • Rotten Boroughs

    Changing population patterns created a particularly rotten political situation in the United Kingdom over a period of several hundred years. It remained uncorrected until the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The House of Commons, the lower house, has its roots all the way back in the Thirteenth Century in England. Each borough — roughly analogous…

  • Back to the Lines

    My fascination with lines returns as a recurring theme once again on Twelve Mile Circle, like previous articles such as Wisconsin vs. Florida, Reno vs. Los Angeles, and Glasgow vs. Madrid. I found myself thinking about lines of latitude and longitude this morning when I noticed a random search engine query that pondered whether Portland,…

  • Oreton

    Have you ever been to Oreton? So you say you’ve never heard of it? Neither had I until a few days ago. Let’s just say it has some rather interesting urban design elements. England I started my search in England and found a Street View image of one Oreton candidate in a rural corner of…

  • Cog Railways

    Many years ago my fiancé (now wife) and I traveled through northern New England for two weeks. That was long ago. We actually tent-camped our way through a string of rustic state parks with few amenities. It changed to Bed-and-Breakfasts Inns after our marriage. Then it changed again to whatever hotel happened to have an…