Quirky stuff on maps - 3

I've finally got round to reading Map Addict, by Mike Parker, on the enthusiastic recommendation of several friends. It's a sort of Fever Pitch for OS map fans, nicely written, humorous, and full of interesting sort of stuff for the sort of people that find this sort of stuff interesting.

(His priorities sometimes wander away from the scholarly - he devotes seven lines to William Smith's iconic and ground-breaking geological map of 1815, compared to 234 lines about the Cerne Abbas Giant's willy, for instance - but there's plenty of good stuff. He's good on map anomalies, satnav hate, secret bases, enclaves and exclaves, memorable Ordnance Survey maps, and Spurn Point.)

If you've ever cycled anywhere just because it looked curious on the map, it's for you. I've done this many times, often with friends. I once cycled to Ousefleet, home of the OS's most empty square, for instance. There was nothing there.

And, browsing maps the other day, I came across two more curiosities that made me plan cycle visits. First is a place called Dairsie or Osnaburgh near Cupar, Fife - are there any other places in Britain with 'or' in their title? Is this some sort of council funding tax dodge?

Then there's the two confusingly named villages of Burton Stather and Burton on Stather (right). Both are in Lincolnshire, and next to each other. (It brings to mind the two separate neighbouring villages in Essex both called Great Totham.) The Burtons are coincidentally just up the lane from Ousefleet's Zen square. Perhaps there's just not that much to do up in north Lincs.

Quirky stuff on maps - 2

Following yesterday's post, more map curiosities. Most of these have been culled from Internet sources.


1. Ordnance Survey's Zen square
Ousefleet, a village north of Scunthorpe, on the south bank of the Humber not far from Trent Falls, is officially the dullest kilometre of all OS maps. It’s the nearest we have to a completely empty square in the entire UK map system, according to a computer search by the chaps at OS. All it contains is a single electricity pylon. There's a photo of the square at the Geograph project.

I did cycle here once to see what it's like. I couldn't see anything though.

(Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.)

2. Map making for dummies
Ever wondered what happens to crash-test dummies when they retire, if they survive all those impacts? They slip into parts of trial coding that the programmer forgot to update. Try a Multimap search on 'dummy2396' (map view, not OS view) and you'll see that it is now living in this caravan park in East Yorkshire. It's on Google maps too.

3. Welcome to Middle England
According to a Daily Mail article on the OS, the exact centre of mainland Britain (the point on which Great Britain would balance if you stuck it on a pencil) is SD 72321 36671. The precise centre is on an empty square metre of ground just off the A59, behind a sewage works near Whalley in Lancashire.

However, if it was the UK you were balancing, you'd have to move your pencil to Dunsop Bridge in the Forest of Bowland. If you were doing a Land's End-John o'Groats bike ride, you'd have to ride via here for the sake of symmetry.

4. Point furthest from a road in UK
According to the Ordnance Survey, the furthest point from a metalled road in Great Britain is on the hillside of Ruadh Stac Beag, between Letterewe Forest and Fisherfield Forest in Wester Ross, Highland, Scotland. The distance from here to the nearest road (A832) is 11 km (7 miles).