Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Southwick Jog

    Follow the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts westward and you’ll notice a little notch in an otherwise straight line. Many call this 2-1/2 mile dip the Southwick Jog after the town that plugs the hole. The ultimate authority and definitive source is “The Southwick Jog” by Rev. Edward R. Dodge, as appearing in Southwick, Massachusetts…

  • Neutral Moresnet

    All this recent talk on Twelve Mile Circle about strange European borders and condominium arrangements brings me to one of my favorite former anomalies: Neutral Moresnet. This place existed as somewhat of a no-man’s-land lodged firmly between sovereign neighbors from 1816 to 1920. Europe looked different as Napoleon’s empire dissolved. The victors negotiated amongst themselves…

  • Condominium (not that kind)

    A condominium is a concept in international law that describes a geographic area shared in equal sovereignty by two nations. As a practical matter, it creates a genuinely unusual and often impractical solution. A condominium isn’t distinctly part of any one nation but by agreement it’s within the control of both. So it has no…

  • Border Hunting Related Adventures

    I’d like to recommend a blog I ran across recently, Hugh’s Border Blog (“Border Hunting Related Adventures”). As regular readers of Twelve Mile Circle already know, borders, boundaries and divisions fascinate me to an unusual degree. That’s true whether they’re artificial or natural. Hugh seems to have the same interest, maybe even more so. He…

  • The Erie Triangle

    If one ponders a map of the United State’s and focuses on one of its four Commonwealths, specifically Pennsylvania, one will notice something a bit odd with its borders. The northern, southern and western borders all form straight lines of exact longitude or latitude. However there’s an exception, a little notch at the far northwestern…

  • Killiniq Island, Canada

    Sometime I come across the most interesting topics while researching other topics, as was the case when I investigated the Labrador Boundary Dispute recently. That thread led me to the unusual significance of Killiniq Island in northeastern Canada. Killiniq Island is very small. It’s only about 13 X 29 kilomteres (8 X 18 miles). It…

  • Traveling Man

    It seems I’ve done a lot of traveling as I look back across the last several months. I travel fairly frequently anyway for work and for pleasure, but this has been a particularly busy period. Here’s a recap of places I’ve visited since the Spring, as told through previous Twelve Mile Circle dispatches. If you’ve…

  • Labrador Boundary Dispute

    No internal Canadian boundary extends further than the one between Québec and Newfoundland & Labrador. It extends more than 3,500 kilometres (2,100 miles). Yet, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the government has never officially surveyed or marked it on the ground. It has a history of dispute that continues through today. The southern boundary was…

  • Charleston Preview

    I’ve spent the last several days in Charleston, South Carolina, and packed a lot of visiting into a short amount of time. Of course I’ll add more information to the permanent pages of my Travel Adventures site over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to give you (my regular blog readers), a sneak…

  • Cooch Behar Quadripoint Boundary Cross

    UPDATE: India and Bangladesh resolved this situation by exchanging territory and removing the exclaves in 2015. A quadripoint occurs when four borders meet at a single point. For example this happens in the United States at the “Four Corners“. There, the states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado join together. In previous entries I’ve…

Latest Comments

  4. Osage Orange trees are fairly common in Northern Delaware. I assumed they were native plants. As kids we definitely called…

  5. Enough of them in Northern Delaware that they don’t stand out at all until the fruit drops in the fall.…