Category: United Kingdom

  • Longdon England. Yes with a G.

    So what happens when someone wants a map of London and accidentally fat-fingers the keyboard and spells it “Longdon?” Google Maps still processes the request but it doesn’t return one of the most significant cities in the world as one originally intended. The results are considerably more humble. Worcestershire Even more amazingly, there are at…

  • Prime Meridian Capital Cities

    School must be back in session. I can sense that must have happened because I’m capturing an exact phrase from multiple Internet Protocol addresses in my search engine query logs: “The Primer Meridian runs through what two capital cities?“ Could it be a Coincidence? I think not. I remember those bygone days of excessive homework…

  • European Latitude Paradoxes

    There aren’t any great research efforts or revelations today, just some interesting observations about various lines of latitude in western Europe. I spend a lot of time simply looking at maps, at the patterns, and the logical contradictions that aren’t always apparent in our conventional thoughts. These are a few that have made me smile…

  • All Vowel Place Names

    I come across various language trivia lists on the Intertubes all the time. They cover a thousand different topics but some of them focus on words of unnatural length composed solely of vowels. It doesn’t take much to entertain me but you already knew that. They’re somewhat amusing but they do tend to stretch towards…

  • Magic Roundabout

    My childhood happened in a time before video games completely transformed the adolescent earth. Sure, we enjoyed a little screen time with those early Atari consoles but we also had plenty of non-electronic diversions too. I loved making intricate designs as they sprang forth from highly simplistic repetitive motions on a Spirograph. Those crazy geometric…

  • Islands Below Sea Level

    Are there any islands below sea level? The question seemed absurd on its surface when I noticed it lodged in my web logs in the form of a search engine query. However I’ve learned to not be so dismissive. I’ve uncovered increasingly obscure artifacts and encountered surprisingly unusual situations in the years I’ve written Twelve…

  • Odd Irish Border Road

    New reader Ian, an Irish expat living in California, has an interest in border anomalies. He pointed out an instance in his native Ireland: the most direct road corridor between two points crosses an international border multiple times in the space of just a few miles. I am aware of a similar condition in the…

  • Flipping Lat/Long Directions

    I was looking at the Latitude / Longitude coordinates of my residence a few days ago and I decided to keep the same coordinates but switch between North and South, East and West. An easy way to do this is to drop the coordinates in Google Maps and then change between positives and negatives. So…

  • What Crosses an Airport Runway?

    The world of geo-oddities extends even to airport runways, and I’ve uncovered several curiosities over the past several days. The areas served by airports don’t always confine themselves to neat, tidy spaces. Oftentimes transportation resources represent a cooperative spirit between neighbors as they band together to meet a common need. Sometimes it’s just the opposite,…

  • Revisiting Previous Articles with Street View – UK

    I’m still having a great time with the recent major release of Google Street View images for the United Kingdom. It’s like somebody opened a new playground with so many different places for me to travel vicariously. It also offered an opportunity to go back to some of my earlier articles and see if I…