Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Terrain

  • Appalachian Loop, Part 3 (Cultural Threads)

    Appalachia described more than a physical geography. It described a proudly self-reliant people who’d lived within these hills and hollows on their own wits for more than two centuries. I mentioned some of my perceptions after I visited Kentucky in 2013. It would be all to easy to reduce Appalachia to unfair hillbilly stereotypes. Naturally…

  • Appalachian Loop, Part 2 (Vistas)

    Notions of endless horizons came to mind as I prepared for an Appalachian Loop. We would cross mountaintops, dip into hollows and follow valley flatlands along tumbling rivers amid early signs of spring. This journey promised stunning scenery in a little-visited and often under-appreciated rural preserve. People who ventured into Appalachia as tourists usually came…

  • Appalachian Loop, Part 1 (The Quest)

    It began with a simple premise. Finish Virginia. The Commonwealth of Virginia was a particularly difficult journey for County Counters due to its odd configuration of 95 counties and 38 independent cities. It also happened to be my home state. I’d long been irritated that I still hadn’t completed it. I’d chipped away at the…

  • Thanks a Million

    Longtime readers know that I check user statistics for Twelve Mile Circle daily. However, I don’t often examine figures that go all the way back to the earliest days of the blog. I did that recently, and to my surprise discovered that visitors had arrived from more than one million distinct sources since its inception.…

  • Naming All Those Lakes

    I mentioned finding lakes named Tin Can Mike and Hungry Jack in northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area (BWCAW), when I posted the article called simply Mike. There were limitless lakes within that wilderness, so many that people naming them had to revert to linguistic gyrations to separate one from another. I’ll get to…

  • Sawtooth Elsewhere

    A sawtooth may not exist in Rhode Island. Nonetheless, I found plenty of others sawtooths (sawteeth?) elsewhere throughout the English-speaking world. That provided a wonderful opportunity to continue on a theme. Additionally it offered a chance to choose advantageous locations. By that I meant I decided to fill empty spots on the Complete Index map…

  • Naviduct

    Twelve Mile Circle decided to stick with the aqueduct theme once again after the recent discussion of England’s Barton Swing Aqueduct. There were other structures, equally fascinating in their own distinct ways. Some were large, some were unusual, and some offered elements of both. Many of those innovative structures seemed to concentrate in western Europe,…

  • Barton Swinging

    England underwent an extensive Canal Age in the mid Eighteenth Century, lasting for longer than a century. Waterways provided an inexpensive means to move goods across a nation. This, in turn, helping to spark the country’s rapid transformation during the Industrial Revolution. Canals offered remarkable improvements over rutted, muddy overland routes and provided the best…

  • Select African Superlatives

    I thought I’d lump another set of somewhat related items together as I continued to cull the enormous backlog of possible Twelve Mile Circle topics. However, they didn’t have much in common except that they all involved continental Africa. Two involved geographical observations and the other two related to geological oddities. All of them piqued…

  • Big Ugly

    I’m working out the details for a short trip in March, a county counting adventure, although I haven’t determined all of the details yet and I’m not quite ready to share the objective. I’ll hit a personal milestone if everything works out as planned so I have plenty of motivation. Part of the drive will…