The worldwide celebration of Ireland’s patron saint, St Patrick, has almost always been held on the 17th of March. This year, due to Easter arriving unusually early, the Catholic Church decided to move St Patrick’s day so that it didn’t take place during “holy week”.

This year’s celebrations were moved to the 15th of March, meaning that in time-honoured Google Sightseeing tradition (even when taking into account our unique time-zone arrangements), we’ve totally missed it¹.

Regardless, here is the shamrock-shaped maze near Dublin airport which we had lined up for today.

However for once we’re not alone - although many cities did spend Saturday celebrating with parades, green river dye and large quantities of Guinness - New York and Dublin steadfastly refused to budge, and their celebrations will also take place today!

Luckily March the 17th doesn’t again fall in holy week until 2160, so none of us will have to worry about it ever again.

Thanks to Fergal ohagan.

As 2007 draws to a close we present our choices for the best posts of the year.

Best Mystery

There were numerous contenders for the most confusing or bizarre images, but our pick is the Mystery Plane Outline, as even the generally accepted answer, that these are small rocks arranged in the shape of a plane, still begs the question: “But why bother?”.

Best personal project

In February we were impressed with one man’s attempt to single-handedly recreate a cruise ship in his front drive.

Lamest World Record

The Largest Wooden ship in the world from April easily wins this prize, due to having a less-than-exciting title and the fact that the specially built ship has never even been in the water!

A special mention also goes to the German towns squabbling over who has the most unintentionally leaning building.

Our Brains Hurt Award

Getting our heads around the Island and Lake recursion from September’s Island Week 2 was almost too much, but I think we get it now…

Best Smallest Thing

We loved the idea of the world’s smallest parks from January, but the world’s smallest municipal park was just too darn small to see from satellite! Fortunately, Google now have a street view shot of it.

Best World’s Most Enlarged Thing

In the last year we’ve featured many, many sights that claim to be the “World’s largest something” but our pick for the Best Largest something is the World’s largest fingerprint.

Best Imagery

Undoubtedly the most amazing images to be found in Google Earth are the African Megaflyover project aerial shots, and the best of these images were highlighted in November’s Google Sightseeing Safari.

Best Blurry Pictures

Some of the aerial images in Google Earth are amazingly high resolution, but not high enough for our tour of miniature parks across the globe, which ended up as a list of blurry blobs that sort-of look like the Eiffel tower.

Best Landart

The ancient Incan geoglyph of a cat is fantastic, and much more intersting and attractive than kfc’s logo stunt.

Most Ignored Warning

A few days after we posted this year’s April fools joke: “Live Satellite Images in Google Earth” we updated the entry with a banner warning users that it was a prank and there are no live images to be seen. Did anyone read that? Of course not! We still get a new message almost every week from someone who fell for the joke and wants to know where the live images are.

Most In-Depth Post

For a long time it had no decent imagery, so during Island Week this year we really went to town on our Easter Island post, and managed to condense 2,000 years of history into a mere 600 words.

Best Large Type

The rooftop message “Welcome to Cleveland” isn’t very interesting at first glance, until you realise that the message is over 400 miles away in Milwaukee!

So that’s our picks of the year, but with over 250 entries in 2007, what were your favourites?

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2008 - see you all next year!

Somebody must have committed a major crime, as it would appear the Brighton and Hove arm of the Sussex constabulary have been dusting for prints around Hove Park, and uncovered what is clearly the the world’s largest fingerprint!

This fingerprint measures around 38 metres, which suggests that this criminal’s size would make it slightly difficult for them to hide very effectively, right?

More information on the fingerprint.

Thanks to the eagle-eyed Anthony Houghton.

The Crystal Palace was a huge iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 (photo tour). After the exhibition the building was moved to Upper Norwood where it stood from 1854 until 1936, when it was sadly destroyed by fire.

Today the park where it stood is still known as Crystal Palace Park, but where the building originally was, now stands the 222 metre Crystal Palace Transmitter, which is surprisingly, London’s 2nd tallest structure (second only to Canary Wharf!).

There are remnants of the exhibition still here however, including this awesome collection of wholly anatomically inaccurate dinosaur sculptures!

Another relic of the Victorian era is this fantastic circular maze, which dates all the way back to 1872!

Obligatory Wikipedia links: The Crystal Palace, the Great Exhibition, Crystal Palace Park, the Crystal Palace Transmitter, Crystal Palace Victorian Dinosaurs.

Thanks: Alain Trembleau and Simon Cope.

This is a crop maze in Dingle, Ireland which celebrates the local hero, Fungi the Dolphin (it’s supposed to be a picture of a dolphin, and the text reads “Fungi 20 years in Dingle”). Apparently, Fungi is a bottlenose dolphin who took up residence in Dingle Harbour in 1984 and has been entertaining locals and tourists ever since. The Do Dingle Website says:

He is a curious and friendly animal, and has been photographed bringing gifts to divers of still living fish, clasped gently within his jaws

Make of this story what you will

Thanks to Tom.

Another great farm maze here, this one is west of Toronto in Canada. I’ve rotated the image in thumbnail so you can make it out. It shows a farm, with barn and silo and wee tractor pulling a trailer at the bottom. Cheekily, there is also a URL which I worked out to be www.downeysfarm.on.ca.

Thanks: Shaun Hill

This is the “Milton Maize Maze” just north of Cambridge in England. The maze is created differently every year in a field of maize and visitors can pay entry to attempt to navigate it. From the photos on their website it looks pretty tricky as the maize grows quite high!

As one reader put it:

Now we can cheat by looking from above

Except that this is no doubt the maze from a few years ago

Thanks: Dave Holland, Simon Hamilton-Roberts & Donald Allwright

The 2002 design of the Heartland Country Corn Maze near Harrisburg was a coyote howling at the moon (with the letters USA in the lower right corner). This year they drew a 6.6 acre triceratops.

Thanks: David Thornton