Yesterday I made a rather rash statement that there is only one county in mainland Britain that I haven’t visited and that was Cornwall. After saying this I started to check my facts and I realise that it wasn’t correct – I hadn’t visited Grampian and Cleveland. However, as with all things geographical attention needs to be paid to boundaries as well as political ones.
Over the centuries whilst there has been a a general sense of continuity in the British, and by British I mean the countries that make up the main island of the British Isles archipelago – more geographical and political boundaries. This being said the boundaries from time to time do move considerably, Berwick upon Tweed is perhaps the best example of this, changing from being in Scotland and England a number of time. In fact Berwickshire is an old Scottish county but it’s county town is now firmly in England. Now Berwickshire has been subsumed into the Border’s regional council – a political boundary.
So which counties should I count? I think the boundaries that best suit my story are the modern administrative ones that lump together many of the ancient counties and shires of Scotland into much larger geographical areas. Using this definition the only county I haven’t visited in Scotland is Grampian. Hair splitting I know but it’s my story and so I set the rules – more boundaries.
As far as England is concerned then, apart from Cornwall which doesn’t consider itself part of England, the only other county I haven’t visited is Cleveland. However, Cleveland used to be part of the North Riding of Yorkshire until quite recently so perhaps I should count Cleveland after all. You see how slippery and yet how important boundaries are.
I then decided to look where I had taken photographs and fortunately Adobe Lightroom has a wonderful tool that uses the geo tagging data captured with an image to plot where the photograph was taken. Unfortunately this information is only recorded by my iPhone so I’m going to have to manually tag most of my archive my photographs. This will take some time but I think it will be worth it. Anyway the following two maps show the results to date of my travels. Of course by publishing this I allowing data on my life to be passed into the public domain which is a concern until you realise just how much data is recorded by Google alone on individuals and suddenly this seems somewhat trivial.
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