Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: United Kingdom

  • Definitely Halfway

    I think it was back in January when I focused on the little town of Halfway, Oregon. I was pretty impressed when I thought they’d named it that way because of the nearby 45th parallel of latitude north — i.e., halfway between the equator and the North Pole. That turned out to be a false…

  • English Whitewater

    Speaking of clapper bridges… we were talking about clapper bridges, right? They’re not all confined to Devonshire. The Tarr Steps clapper bridge is a notable exception located in Somerset at Exmoor National Park. Unlike the clapper bridges of Devon that date primarily from the middle ages and later eras, the Tarr Steps clapper may date…

  • Clapper Bridges

    A simple form of bridge design features a series of stone slabs set atop rock pilings. It ranks maybe one rung up from stepping stones placed in the water or logs laid from bank-to-bank on the evolutionary scale of bridge design. Regardless, it certainly falls within the more primitive bridge construction types imaginable. In England,…

  • Turlough

    Sometimes odd geography intersects with odd geology. One particularly rare example occurs on the island of Ireland. It’s called a Turlough or Turlach. Described very simply, it’s an ephemeral lake that appears during the wetter months of autumn through springtime and dries-up during the summer. Most of the examples happen west of the River Shannon.…

  • Right Place – Wrong Side of the Atlantic

    I recently read the the Basement Geographer’s True Name Map of the West Kootenay/Boundary. That, in turn, derived from an earlier project from Kalimedia. I wondered how a detailed True Name map would look for my little corner of the world as I considered the project. For now it remains on that large pile of…

  • Exclamatory Towns!

    I intended to focus on places that have punctuation included as part of their official names. I found two basic categories: those with an apostrophe denoting a possessive; and well, that’s about it. Undeterred, I searched further and eventually found three towns with exclamation points. Excited in Westward Ho! The name of a town in…

  • Antipodes Islands

    I’m back to my antipodes fixation again, a recurring theme here on Twelve Mile Circle. I’d placed this one on my mental list as I researched the Closest Antipodal National Capitals a few weeks ago. Today I feature the Antipodes Islands Group of New Zealand (map). Characteristics The Antipodes Islands, part of a collective of…

  • Over the Road

    An image posted by reader Katy in a comment on my recent Tunnels, Bridges, Lifts and Inclines article completely captivated me. It shows a canal going over a road in the Netherlands. The interesting aspect, to me, is that a viewer can determine the actual depth of the canal. Highway engineers were kind enough to…

  • Tunnels, Bridges, Lifts and Inclines

    I’d love to spend a few weeks on a narrowboat traveling through the canals and inland waterways of Great Britain. The nation offers literally thousands of miles of publicly-accessible routes with much of it interconnected into a single system, allowing one to experience the countryside at four miles per hour. This article isn’t so much…

  • Lancaster Minnesota to Lancashire England

    Slow news day. Let’s see if I can cobble something together. I opened up Google Analytics in map mode and noticed a small, isolated dot. It fell suspiciously near the Minnesota-Manitoba-North Dakota Highpoint. So I drilled down a little further and found a visitor from the tiny town of Lancaster, Minnesota. I’d never heard of…