Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • What the Drung?

    While we’re speaking of street suffixes — we were just speaking of street suffixes, weren’t we — and after the stravenue encounter, 12MC stumbled upon a suffix of even more weirdness: Drung. Imagine, living not on a street, an avenue, a boulevard, a drive or even a terrace, rather a drung. Drung used in this…

  • Order in the Court

    “Court” is one of many common suffixes used to describe streets or roads. It likely derived from a term that referred to an open-air interior space hemmed-in by the walls of a large building such as a castle, as in a courtyard. Generally, not always, a road appended with court denotes a very short non-connecting…

  • Twelve Mile Square Reservation

    Twelve Mile Circle meets a Twelve Mile Square. I thought I’d found just about every subject with a Twelve Mile theme, every town, every lake, every building, even every bottle. Apparently I missed one, although in my own defense I’ll note that it was a different shape. It formed a square rather than a circle:…

  • Border Hopping on the Welsh Marches Line

    I found some border weirdness between Pontrilas in Herefordshire, England and Pandy in Monmouthshire, Wales. All would be fine in an automobile. Drive between the towns on A465, cross an unremarkable bridge over the border and continue on one’s way for an eight-minute journey (map). No big deal. Take the same trip by train however…

  • DC Brewery Trail

    EDITOR’S UPDATE: THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2013. THE LOCAL BEER SCENE HAS GROWN AND CHANGED CONSIDERABLY SINCE THAT TIME. How does one justify a series of brewery visits within the subject matter of a geo-oddities blog? Good question. Author’s prerogative? Precedence? Ultimately I considered it a road trip; a very short and very specialized…

  • That’s Siouan for Water

    I noticed an interesting geographic prefix as I explored Minnedosa, Manitoba in Triple Letter – Canada. The same prefix also applied to one of the individual United States, specifically Minnesota. In both cases the “Minne” portion derived from a Siouan word for water. Minnedosa was Flowing Water and Minnesota was Cloudy Water. I wondered if…

  • Live Long and Prosper (burp)

    Twelve Mile Circle is all about geo-oddities although the author of the site has other interests too. Sometimes those topics collide. I’ve made no bones about my interest in craft beer and it creeps into 12MC from time to time. Today is one of those times. I noticed a passing reference to Vulcan Beer in…

  • Arlington County Will Grow

    I stumbled across an article in the Washington Business Journal a few days ago. They called it, Over the river: Reagan National runway to be shifted into the Potomac. This probably wouldn’t mean much to most people. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority will adjust one of DCA’s notoriously short runways ever so slightly. That’s a…

  • Ferry Hopping

    I’m completely humbled by the response to the recent “How Many Islands in the USA Require Ferry Travel” article. I found 64 islands matching the criteria and stood back smugly until user-after-user uncovered additional instances that I’d overlooked. The number of islands currently stands at 77. It wouldn’t surprise me if it continued to grow.…

  • Triple Letter – Canada

    Recently I posted an article that described all of the places in the United States where the county seat, the county, and the state all began with the same letter. I considered seven instances where each of the three levels of government had completely different names to be particularly “outstanding.” For example, one was Gibson,…

Latest Comments

  1. The British flag continues to fly at Roche Harbor, a couple miles north of English Camp.

  3. Been there Once for a few years. In 76 &77. Ran cooperative store. Even though it was very isolated It…

  4. As an Alaskan I always wondered why Interstates were a big deal. From my point of view a road went…