Your bits of totally useless geographical trivia please...

[anti-pacer]

Hunstanton is a west facing Norfolk resort, and you can watch the sun set over the sea.

And from the comfort of your Hunstanton home, you can watch Calendar News from ITV Yorkshire.

 

[deltic1989]

There is a road called Boundary Lane in Saltney, Chester, where the English/Welsh border runs right down the middle. This apparently is the only urban street in England and Wales where this happens. So depending which side of the road you live on depends who polices where you live, who you pay council tax to, and even if you get free prescriptions as standard or not.

Furthermore, just up the road at the Deva Stadium - the home of lowly Chester City FC - part of the West Stand is in Wales.

If you think that's bad imagine living here.

Wouldn't be Cheshire Cheese if the cow lives on a farm that straddles the border!
It's an interesting legal point, livestock gets moved from farm to farm, sometimes different counties, sometimes even countries. Can a cow deliver pure Cheshire milk when it's only been in a Cheshire field for a day, the rest of it's life it was slumming it in Northumberland??
Irish Beef - what if the cow was only in Ireland for a week, and came over from the UK?

On a slightly related note. What if I were to set up a kitchen on the Tamar Bridge, with half my prep table in Devon and the other half in Cornwall. I begin to make a pasty with the dough, fillings etc, on the same split as the table, and put it in a similarly split oven. Is it still a Cornish Pasty?

 

[Howardh]

Hunstanton is a west facing Norfolk resort, and you can watch the sun set over the sea.

On the A495 you can drive out of Wales into England - westwards!

 

[Howardh]

If you think that's bad imagine living here.



On a slightly related note. What if I were to set up a kitchen on the Tamar Bridge, with half my prep table in Devon and the other half in Cornwall. I begin to make a pasty with the dough, fillings etc, on the same split as the table, and put it in a similarly split oven. Is it still a Cornish Pasty?

You need to find out what they do in your link to Baarle Hertog! In that town, the border/s go through houses, shops and restaurants, so in a bar you can be served in Holland and drink in Belgium without leaving the room. Sometimes the law can state that establishments have to be closed by 11.30pm in Belgium...everyone totter to the other side of the room!

 

[anti-pacer]

You need to find out what they do in your link to Baarle Hertog! In that town, the border/s go through houses, shops and restaurants, so in a bar you can be served in Holland and drink in Belgium without leaving the room. Sometimes the law can state that establishments have to be closed by 11.30pm in Belgium...everyone totter to the other side of the room!

How mad is that?

 

[507021]

The southernmost point of England is actually Lizard Point, not Lands End.

 

[deltic1989]

You need to find out what they do in your link to Baarle Hertog! In that town, the border/s go through houses, shops and restaurants, so in a bar you can be served in Holland and drink in Belgium without leaving the room. Sometimes the law can state that establishments have to be closed by 11.30pm in Belgium...everyone totter to the other side of the room!

That must get interesting if things get out of hand and the Police have to be called. Dutch Police show up and Mr Drunk sidesteps them crossing the border on the way, also without leaving the room.

 

[meridian2]

And from the comfort of your Hunstanton home, you can watch Calendar News from ITV Yorkshire.

I visited for the first time last year, and was told what Cleethorpes is to Doncaster, and Skegness is to Nottingham, Hunstanton is to Peterborough, the default wakes week destination. Probably more of a day trip or weekend spot nowadays. Completely at odds with the rest of the Norfolk coast, though jolly in its own fish and chips way.

 

[DaleCooper]

You need to find out what they do in your link to Baarle Hertog! In that town, the border/s go through houses, shops and restaurants, so in a bar you can be served in Holland and drink in Belgium without leaving the room. Sometimes the law can state that establishments have to be closed by 11.30pm in Belgium...everyone totter to the other side of the room!

You could play hopscotch on the map of that place.

 

[Howardh]

You could play hopscotch on the map of that place.

I have, there!! Wonderful place, but not well served by buses. probably because the driver had to drive through 10 borders. Between stops.....

 

[Howardh]

That must get interesting if things get out of hand and the Police have to be called. Dutch Police show up and Mr Drunk sidesteps them crossing the border on the way, also without leaving the room.

There are local by-laws for that, and chasing criminals in cars. The biggest concern is taxes, householders in NL could pay more tax than B (and vice-versa) and if their house straddles the border, and the are in Belgium but think they will pay less tax in Holland, they move the door, because the front door determines which country you are in. Seriously.

 

[Calthrop]

It is (still) possible to drive through Russia without a visa or Permit. It's the The Saatse Boot and you are in Estonia, but the road cuts through Russia for a few hundred metres and you emerge back in Estonia (EU). No checks, no border - but you are being watched and must drive straight through without stopping or leaving your vehicle.

I understand that before the reunification of Germany, there were a number of similar oddities along the West / East German border -- again, basically you travelled through without stopping. Bryan Morgan in his The End of the Line mentions one such as at the 1950s, perhaps a trifle melodramatically: on a West German rail line in the Harz Mountains area, running close to the border: "where once the line crosses a river and crosses back immediately afterwards I suppose that you are technically in Province Saxony and Russia". And I gather that in divided Berlin, there was positively crazy stuff of this kind...

Stilton cheese could only be made in Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. They produced some in Hartington in the Peak District, very close to the Staffordshire border, but because it's in Derbyshire it was allowed.

And the village of Stilton from which the cheese gets its name, is in Cambridgeshire (previously Huntingdonshire). The name came about, I gather, because of Stilton's location on the Great North Road: it was the chief collection point for transport onwards, for this powerful kind of cheese made in the wild-ish hill country to the west and north.


The world’s most complicated situation of “enclaves / exclaves of nations surrounded by the territory of other nations” (with all due respect, putting the Baarle Hertog business in the shade) involves a place called Dahala Khagrabari, near the India / Bangladesh border. D.K. is a small area of Indian territory, completely surrounded by an area of Bangladeshi territory, which is in turn completely surrounded by an area of Indian territory; which is surrounded by the territory in toto, of the nation of Bangladesh. This, I gather, is called a “third-order exclave”: the only one in the world.

 

[najaB]

The southernmost point of England is actually Lizard Point, not Lands End.

The northernmost point in mainland Scotland is Dunnet Head, not John O'Groats.

 

[meridian2]

Until the 1970s boundary changes, Flintshire (Wales) had a completely detached bit in England between Cheshire and Shropshire. A large chunk of Denbighshire ensured the two parts weren't even close.

 

[Merseysider]

The Wirral, despite being less than 10 miles square, has a higher population than the European nations Andorra, Liechenstein, San Marino, Monaco and the Vatican put together

 

[meridian2]

Yorkshire has a higher GDP than Scotland.

 

[backontrack]

Edinburgh is further west than Carlisle.

 

[Howardh]

I understand that before the reunification of Germany, there were a number of similar oddities along the West / East German border -- again, basically you travelled through without stopping. .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinstücken
Not a village you could travel through...it was a parcel of West Germany stuck in East Germany and about 4-500m from the Berlin Wall. It became surrounded by the wall and linked to West Berlin by a walled corridor (even though technically the corridor was on East German land).
A map = https://www.berlin.de/mauer/_assets/steinstuecken_1972.jpg
And that corridor today https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place...557a44161f9eb06!8m2!3d52.3892918!4d13.1296008 still rather spooky!

 

[Howardh]

The Wirral, despite being less than 10 miles square, has a higher population than the European nations Andorra, Liechenstein, San Marino, Monaco and the Vatican put together

And rather cruelly I might add Scotland can't beat any of them *written by a pained Scotland fan....*

 

[MotCO]

If you travel from Greenwich, Connecticut due north, due west, due south or due east, the next state you come to is New York.

Also, if you travel from the Pacific Ocean to the Atantic Ocean via the Panama Canal, you will travel north west through the canal.

 

[meridian2]

Varosha in Cyprus, a favoured resort of Liz Taylor and Brigit Bardot, has been completely closed since the 1974 conflict. It includes a car showroom full of new cars of the day, and clothing shops with mannequins in 70s fashions.

 

[anti-pacer]

I visited for the first time last year, and was told what Cleethorpes is to Doncaster, and Skegness is to Nottingham, Hunstanton is to Peterborough, the default wakes week destination. Probably more of a day trip or weekend spot nowadays. Completely at odds with the rest of the Norfolk coast, though jolly in its own fish and chips way.

It gets a lot of Leicester people too.

 

[najaB]

Also, if you travel from the Pacific Ocean to the Atantic Ocean via the Panama Canal, you will travel north west through the canal.

'Sea level' at the western end of the Panama Canal can be as much as 20 feet different compared to the eastern end (due the massive difference in tides).

 

[Calthrop]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinstücken
Not a village you could travel through...it was a parcel of West Germany stuck in East Germany and about 4-500m from the Berlin Wall. It became surrounded by the wall and linked to West Berlin by a walled corridor (even though technically the corridor was on East German land).
A map = https://www.berlin.de/mauer/_assets/steinstuecken_1972.jpg
And that corridor today https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place...557a44161f9eb06!8m2!3d52.3892918!4d13.1296008 still rather spooky!

Bonkers ! I've always felt that the whole divided-Berlin thing -- alongside its aspects which were tragic, and frightening (the threat of all-out war arising from that cause) -- had a considerable element of farce to it.

 

[meridian2]

The Bristol Channel has the second highest tidal range in the world, at 15 metres. Spring tides can be as high as 55ft.

 

[CarltonA]

The border between Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire is just twenty yards (nineteen metres) long.

 

[Cowley]

On a slightly related note. What if I were to set up a kitchen on the Tamar Bridge, with half my prep table in Devon and the other half in Cornwall. I begin to make a pasty with the dough, fillings etc, on the same split as the table, and put it in a similarly split oven. Is it still a Cornish Pasty?

You and your table would be knocked off the bridge by a Gregory's transport lorry and on the long drop to the river you would be contemplating why the Cornish bit of the pasty was giving you heartburn.

 

[Bald Rick]

You and your table would be knocked off the bridge by a Gregory's transport lorry and on the long drop to the river you would be contemplating why the Cornish bit of the pasty was giving you heartburn.

But on the bright side, your scone would have the clotted cream both under and over the jam.

 

[anti-pacer]

The short 45 minutes non-stop hop by rail from Stockport to Sheffield takes in 4 counties across 3 regions.

Also, Epping Forest is spread over 3 council areas, but is owned by another council - The City of London.

 

[Cowley]

But on the bright side, your scone would have the clotted cream both under and over the jam.

Actually that could work out quite well .