Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: England

  • Semi-Practical Exclaves Galore!

    I mentioned a semi-practical exclave in Australia a few days ago. This was a spot in New South Wales where a resident in an automobile could exit his neighborhood without ever leaving NSW. However, he could return only via Queensland. I noted somewhat tongue-in-cheek that the “…situation becomes very special, perhaps unique, meaning I didn’t…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…