This is obviously from Google Earth. It’s approximately pentagonal and covers much of Western Europe. Most of it is within the territory of the Roman Empire at maximum extent, but not all. But what is it?
This is the polygon formed by the extreme points of my movements on the surface of this planet. It took around eight years to form this shape, and in fact I’ve just realised some of it is missing because I forgot Aberdeen, which extends the time period to nine years.
Here’s a revised version then:
Right, so now it’s a hexagon and it clearly shows the curvature of the planet because it’s slightly zoomed out. This, then, is the area I’ve occupied and visited in my life. I also visited all of it by travelling by road, rail or ferry. The westernmost point was actually by bike. The maximum distance within this area is between Rome and Inverness, which are 2 112 kilometres apart.
Although I have four times committed the sin of air travel in an heavier than air craft, which also occurred within this hexagon, I had already reached all these points overland and sea, and later on under the sea bed once the Channel Tunnel was built. It’s a modest area compared to many Westerners to be sure, but it has the virtue of having been experienced every step of the way on the surface. I didn’t have the dislocation one experiences of stepping into an airliner and off it again a few hours later without having witnessed the transition from, say, the green chalk downs and streams of Kent and Northern France to the near-desert of Burgos.
The earliest point on this map was laid down in August 1987 CE, when my brother and I visited Aberdeen. Aberdeen is Scotland’s third city, pretty isolated compared to Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and largely made of granite. Even though it was the height of summer, it was a grey, overcast day and pretty cold really. It was also really windy. Aberdeen kind of has a beach, but I get the impression there isn’t much sunbathing on it. To be honest, even Blackpool in England, 370 kilometres to the south, isn’t really suitable for sunbathing or swimming in my opinion. Remarkably, though, like many other coastal towns in Britain, Aberdeen has its share of seaside shops selling buckets and spades and inflatables for the water, so I suppose there are people made of sterner stuff than I.
Inverness is only 133 kilometres from Aberdeen and I’ve been there a few times. Once again it can be exceedingly windy but it seems to be warmer than Aberdeen. Aberdeen has been known to drop below freezing in August, although its average temperature is 8.8°C, whereas Inverness averages 9.2 and has never dropped below freezing in August. It’s also a lot smaller than Aberdeen and doesn’t look overwhelmingly grey, has the fastest river in Britain running through it, which is also very short and probably would’ve stopped any Nessie candidates from entering or leaving the loch. Being the capital of the Highlands, like many other Scottish cities and towns Inverness has a lot more in the way of facilities than an English settlement of similar size.
The next corner of the hexagon is Inishmore, an island off the coast of County Galway and almost as far west as you can go in Europe. Its western end is 9° 50′ west of Greenwich and is unsurprisingly the furthest west I’ve ever been. There used to be an incredibly competitive pair of ferry services to it who would frantically plead and cajole you talking nineteen to the dozen to get you to use their boat rather than the other’s, but this is apparently no longer so because one of them sank the other’s boat! Sarada, I and our daughter cycled the length of the island and encountered its frankly terrifying cliff edge that runs along the southwest edge, and in fact I wonder in a geologically naïve way whether this is connected to it being on the edge of a continent, but whereas that’s an appealing idea it’s probably quite fanciful. Even so, the nearest land on that latitude to the west is over three thousand kilometres away on the east coast of Canada, or rather it’s Double Island in Nova Scotia. I visited Inishmore in 1995. Inverness was the site of a terminal argument between my first girlfriend and me about free range eggs, and County Galway marked the point at which two close friends of ours, with whom we’d gone on holiday, split up, so maybe there’s something about extreme points which puts relationships under stress, like the sweater curse.
The next point is Madrid, where Sarada and I went on our honeymoon in June and July 1993 and have since revisited. Sarada used to live in Madrid, so she was revisiting it after some time away. Madrid is a number of things. It’s at the geographical centre of Spain and the first one of these points which is within the former Roman Empire although it isn’t actually a Roman city and it really shows with its very irregular street pattern. It’s hot and dry, and has a population of three million. The line between Inishmore and Madrid is almost 1 500 kilometres long and cuts across entirely Roman Catholic territory. Because it’s probable that the Gaels came from Spain, I’m likely to have an exclusively male-line connection with Spanish Celts living there in Roman times. I don’t feel a particular affinity with Spain but I do kind of wonder if the reason we got stuck in Burgos was that my ancestors were grabbing my ankles and pulling me down. Spain also hold the distinction of being the only place I’ve ever managed to get sunburnt, owing to being stuck outside in the midsummer Sun for weeks on end while we struggled to get back to England. This led to a flaky skin condition on my face which, surprisingly, resolved when I visited the next point of the hexagon.
Which is Rome, 1 300 kilometres or so almost due East, and once again the line cuts over exclusively Roman Catholic countries. Rome is just awesome. I first went there in July 1988 when I was interrailing with friends, and I was absolutely blown away by the place. Everything is still there! Well, not everything, but the layout of the streets and many of the buildings are ancient Roman. It was when I went back in about 2004 that my skin condition cleared up but unfortunately it returned once I went back to Britain and I was stuck with it for almost another decade. Rome is the furthest east I’ve been, whereas Madrid is the furthest south, but the two cities are on similar latitudes. Rome is 12° 30′ east, whereas Madrid is 40° 25′ north.
The last point is Innsbruck, the famous origin of the ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ and visited a few days before Rome in July 1988 on my interrailing session. It shares a number of features with Aberdeen and perhaps Inverness to a lesser extent. It’s in a mountainous area, it doesn’t mark any compass point extremities for me and it’s the third largest city in a Germanic-speaking partly mountainous Western European country. On my hexagon, it also shares a side with Aberdeen, and this line finally enters Protestant territory. This line is also the only one which cuts across countries I’ve never entered, namely Germany and the Netherlands. The interior of the shape, however, also includes the whole of Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Andorra, none of which are familiar to me. The whole northeastern line ventures into vagueness, but this is probably because the west side is mainly ocean.
Countries which are completely enclosed include Andorra, Liechtenstein, Belgium, the Vatican (just – I’ve walked round it so it has no exposed side even if I hadn’t been elsewhere in Rome such as Trastevere), Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland and of course France, the largest country which is entirely enclosed. The centre of the area seems to be Limoges (“Lions In My Own Garden – Exit Someone”). The total area is larger than any US state and all but twelve countries.
It doesn’t need saying that I have by no means covered every square centimetre of this area, but that brings up a more general issue about what it means to be in a place. If I counted countries instead, the area would stretch from Out Stack to La Restinga and Roque del Barbudo to Museo di Ecologia degli Ecosistemi Mediterranei in Italy (just). It’s also notable that I actually live in the northwest of this area and have explored mainly south and east, and that the northernmost point is still in Great Britain. The largest number of borders between me and home is three, in the Vatican and Austria. The perimeter is getting on for a seventh of the way round the world, a distance light would travel in a single frame of video. However, this depends on the accuracy of that perimeter, because depending on what counts as an area I’ve been to.
The distance to the horizon seems like a reasonable measure, and it might make a difference to my polygon because of St Anton Am Arlberg. While I was in Austria, I climbed the Arlberg, not all the way to the top because it did the usual thing of appearing to be entirely ahead of me every time I thought I’d managed to get most of the way up it. I took a stone from it home with me, which over millions of years might make it a bit shorter if everyone did it so maybe don’t. Therefore it would be cheating to say that the furthest I’ve got sight of on this planet would be the view of the the horizon from the peak of the Arlberg, or rather the Valluga, which is 2 811 metres above sea level, which could extend to a further peak in theory. This is 189 kilometres to sea level, which is at least as far as the Großglockner, which is in any case the highest mountain in Austria and therefore would be easily visible from the Valluga on a clear day. It’s 12° 41′ east, therefore beating Rome by eleven minutes of arc. Beyond that, it becomes rather indeterminate as, for instance, another peak twice as distant but the same height twice as far away would also be visible in the same conditions, and beyond that the refraction of the atmosphere becomes significant. It’s possible to see slightly further than the horizon would be in a vacuum because the atmosphere refracts light and makes distant objects seem higher up than they really are. On Venus this situation is extreme and the viewpoint seems to be at the bottom of a basin when it’s on a flat surface, but it still happens on Earth.
It’s odd that even though German is my second language, sort of, I’ve never actually been to Germany. The languages indigenous to the polygon are English, Irish, Gàidhlig, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton, French, Flemish, Luxembourgisch, Alsatian, Italian, Castilian, Provençal, Latin (the Vatican), German, Dutch, various Swiss and Northern Italian Romance languages and Basque. That’s all surviving Celtic languages and one non-Indo-European language. As for population, it’s harder to work out but it’s above a hundred million people. It’s also large enough for the angles not to conform with plane Euclidean geometry and therefore also area. It covers more than 19° of the curve of the planet. From north to south, a degree of longitude at the latitude of Inverness is fifty-nine kilometres and the same at Madrid’s latitude is eighty-five, nearly half as long again. Most of the area is on land but the biggest area of water is the Celtic Sea and the Bay of Biscay.
I feel a sense of being at home within this irregular hexagon, but more towards the northwest than in other directions. Italy and Spain appeal to me but they don’t feel like my native land, but I think of myself as primarily a White Northwestern European, and by that I include the British Isles, Low Countries, northern part of France, Denmark and the German-speaking countries. I don’t get more specific than that, except that I feel duty-bound to learn Gàidhlig due to my heritage and the fact that it’s endangered. Through that, I feel I should make a connection with the musical tradition of the Q-Celtic areas. I think of Q-Celtic as a linguistic continuum stretching from southwest Ireland to northern Scotland interrupted by speakers mainly of Anglic languages historically. However, I also have it in perspective and am aware that there are many more speakers of Urdu and other North Indian languages in these isles than all of the Q-Celtic speakers put together. I’m also dubious about the idea of Celtic identity and about the idea that Celtic identity is dubious. Nonetheless, every living native speaker of a Celtic language has ancestry within this hexagon, and also every living first language Basque speaker. No other language family or sub-family is represented here in this way. It also contains an unusually large number of imperial capitals with all the dubiosity that carries with it: Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels and just barely Amsterdam, which is twenty kilometres from the line between Innsbruck and Aberdeen. The so-called “Golden Triangle” of wealth within Europe, which seems no longer to be recognised, is partly outside it.
That’s it really. That’s the area I have direct and contiguous experience of, not separated by air travel. I think this is important because it gives me some kind of inkling of the size of the planet, its shape and its connections. It would be increasingly difficult to grasp a larger area of this kind, and much harder to travel on the surface through it.
The soul travels at the pace of a camel.
A Box Of Chocolates 
