I guess it was back in January when I focused on the little town of Halfway, Oregon. I was pretty impressed when I thought they’d named it that way because of the nearby 45th parallel of latitude north — i.e., halfway between the equator and the North Pole. That turned out to be a false assumption. Nonetheless I still managed to find something interesting with Halfway. I tucked away thoughts of other "halfway" places for future exploration.
It didn’t take long to generate several lists of halfway place names. Many nations provide online databases that allow keyword searching. I’m not going to reprint entire lists but I’ve included links to those resources should you wish to explore the subject further. Repeatedly, I asked myself as I reviewed the tallies, "halfway to what?" It’s not often self-evident. Most of these landmarks are rather small. Additionally, many of the endpoints that determined halfway were obscure when referenced originally and have continued to fade in relevance over time.
Canada
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The Canada Geographical Names Data Base (CGNDB) from Natural Resources Canada, a government agency I’ve referenced a number of times, lists 153 Halfway place names including several inhabited but unincorporated areas. There is even a Halfway Mountain in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The Halfway shown above can be found in the township of Madawaska Valley, Renfrew County, in Ontario. I couldn’t find an exact population but there were barely 4,000 people in the entire Madawaska Valley. It’s tiny.
United Kingdom
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The halfway phenomenon seems considerably less pronounced in the United Kingdom. I found only 12 halfways including six inhabited places as I consulted the Gazeteer of British Place Names. I guess this makes sense. I can imagine nineteenth century Canadian mapmakers struggling to come up with enough names, and resorting to halfways and all sorts of other contrived conveniences just to fill the voids and complete the job. The UK is considerably smaller and they’ve had a lot more time to create meaningful names.
I’ve chosen a Halfway in Cynghordy, Carmarthenshire, in Wales. It seemed to be the most significant of the UK halfways based on a quick eyeball examination. I don’t have any empirical evidence to back that claim so please correct me if I’m wrong.
Australia
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The hunt for halfways then switched to Geoscience Australia where I got 96 matches. The most significant of these seems to be Halfway Creek in New South Wales. It’s not much more than a crossroads on the Pacific Highway where one can stop for fuel and maybe a rest. It does look like an attractive place in Street View, though.
United States
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The final stop on our halfway tour takes us to the United States where the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) uncovered 372 instances. One, of course, is Halfway, Oregon which I featured previously. Another is Halfway, Maryland, named for being halfway between the dueling metropolises of Hagerstown (which I’ve heard of) and Williamsport (not the one in Pennsylvania but a much more obscure one in Maryland that I’ve never heard of)
The other decently-sized Halfway, bearing in mind that I’m using this in a relative sense, is Halfway, Missouri. This is distinguishable for being the hometown of David Smith, they guy who shot himself across the Mexico-USA border with a cannon. Did any of you guess where this thread would eventually lead?
Sometimes odd geography intersects with odd geology. One particularly rare example occurs on the island of Ireland. It’s called a Turlough or Turlach. Described very simply, it’s an ephemeral lake that appears during the wetter months of autumn through springtime and dries-up during the summer. Most of the examples happen west of the River Shannon. Here the exposed karst limestone is so riddled with cracks, drains, holes and subterranean channels that rainwater simply disappears into the landscape and gurgles to surface lowpoints, forming Turloughs.
A Turlough has no visible outlet to the sea. It rises and recedes with the local aquifer, at the whim and mercy of prevailing weather patterns. The annual cycle of filling and draining differentiates a turlough from an ordinary spring. Right now the academicians in the crowd are cringing at my over-simplified explanation. There are precise geological and ecological hallmarks of turloughs that I’ve glossed over for expedience. Hopefully the basic idea still gets across.
The etymology of turlough listed in Oxford Dictionaries is "late 17th century: from Irish turloch, from tur ‘dry’ + loch ‘lake’". Others sources build a case that it’s probably something closer to "pasture lake" (also provides some good information on turloughs in general, too).
Turloughs are relatively uncommon even in Ireland — totaling in the low hundreds — and they are disappearing. Farmers have cut channels across them over the centuries to drain them permanently. This makes the land available throughout the year. Draining however destroys a rather unique turlough ecosystem of mosses, algae and fauna that have adapted to the wet-dry cycle. Conservation efforts have expedited in recent decades to preserve what remains.
Republic of Ireland
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All but four turloughs on the planet are found in the Republic of Ireland. Accordingly, the largest and best representations of the phenomenon can also be found here. This example is the Glenamaddy Turlough, associated with the Lough Lurgeen Bog in County Galway. Glenamaddy derives from Gleann na Madadh, or Valley of the Dogs, with speculation that it’s due to its shape at winter extreme. I’m not sure I see the resemblance but I have trouble with these kinds of things.
Irish conservationists consider the entire Lough Lurgeen Bog – Glenamaddy Turlough area to be extremely significant. It is both large in size and relatively undisturbed, a rare combination of factors after hundreds of years of intensive agriculture.
Northern Ireland
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Still on the island of Ireland but now across the border in Northern Ireland are three small turloughs grouped in close proximity west of Lower Lough Erne. They are known as Fardrum Lough, Roosky Lough, and Green Lough and have been designated a European Union "Special Area of Conservation" (SAC). This is the northernmost extreme of a rather unusual turlough habitat.
Wales
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Perhaps most unique of all, and the only example found outside of the island of Ireland, is the Pant-y-llyn Turlough in Wales.[1] It is part of the protected Cernydd Carmel in Carmarthenshire. It’s a small turlough by Irish standards. Nonetheless it’s been studied extensively because it’s such a geographic outlier: one of only four instances of a true turlough in the UK and the only one located on the island of Great Britain by many accounts. I wonder if people traveling through the Carmel Woods SAC even notice it, much less ponder its significance?
[1]Not entirely without debate, however. There is an area of chalk deposits in East Anglia that acts similarly but may or may not meet the strict technical definition of a turlough.
I come across various language trivia lists on the Intertubes all the time. They cover a thousand different topics but some of them focus on words of unnatural length composed solely of vowels. It doesn’t take much to entertain me but you already knew that. They’re somewhat amusing but they do tend to stretch towards the bizarre. Many of the more remarkable words rarely appear in normal conversations. They may qualify from a technical sense but they feel a bit dubious to me. Others are proper names including various geographic locations, and of course those are the ones that interest me the most.
The lists all seem to steal liberally from each other. They blatantly parrot and plagiarize. It’s impossible to uncover the original source. However, I’ve not seen anyone attempt to confirm and map the alleged geographic locations so maybe I can add some value to this pursuit. I found some of the locations but others were too obscure, assuming they actually exist, and I couldn’t locate them in any of the standard online mapping services.
Here are the locations I could find.
Aiea, Hawaii, USA
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Aiea is one of the best all-vowel examples. It’s a four-vowel tongue twister. I’m not sure I’d call it a "town" per se — the government calls it a census-designated place — rather it’s more properly a suburb of Honolulu, Hawaii. Nine thousand people live here so it’s definitely a legitimate geographic location though.
The name has been passed down from one of the original Hawaiian land divisions (or Ahupua’a) dating back to the Hawaiian monarchy. Take a close look at the map and notice the various places bearing the Aiea name: high school; middle school; athletic field; shopping center; and a street. This is definitely one of the crown jewels of all-vowel locations.
Eiao, Marquesas Islands
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Eiao isn’t part of Old McDonald’s Farm but a major northwestern island of the Marquesas. It had an indigenous Polynesian population in ancient times. It later served briefly as a leper colony in the 19th Century. The French military also occupied Eiao as they explored possible nuclear testing sites in the 1970′s. Today, however, much of the island has been overrun and overgrazed by feral sheep and no humans live here. France hopes to return the island to its original ecosystem and they’ve created the Eiao Island Nature Reserve.
Select the Terrain button on the map and notice the elevated ridge that runs the length of the island. Eiao rises abruptly from the sea to an elevation of 576 meters (1,890 feet).
I confirmed other all-vowel geographic locations of lesser length.
- Å. Reputedly there are a number of towns that go by the single letter, Å. I found two in Norway: Å i Tranøy [map] and Å i Lofoten [map]. In both of these instances, "i" means "in" so Å i Tranøy means the town of Å in Tranøy. They add this qualifier so people know which Å is being referenced. There’s supposed to be an Å in Sweden too but I couldn’t locate it.
- Ea [map] is a town in Basque area of Spain.
- Ii [map] is located in Finland.
I also found a polar opposite. For your enjoyment, here is Llwchwr, the Anti-Vowel Community.
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Llwchwr is a community in Wales. I think just about anyone who might glance upon that strange string of consonants would probably guess the same. It’s found on the western edge of Swansea, and is comprised composed of Loughor and Kingsbridge. I love those twisted Welsh words.
