According to Wikipedia there are 37 documented places with a single resident. There may of course be many more not yet listed on Wikipedia, so if you know of one, leave a comment here and I might just edit the Wikipedia page myself!

Onwards to our whirlwind tour, are you ready? Let’s go!

In Canada, there the towns of Raley and Masinasin in Alberta; and in Saskatchewan the towns of Crichton, Estuary, Loomis Ravenscrag, South Fork and Vidora

To Estonia next, and the villages of Koipsi and Rammu which are on neighbouring islands.

The Faroe Islands are next with Nesvík and Mjørkadalur.

Onwards to France and the village of Rochefourchat, with its single house and church. Moving south to New Zealand and the village of Cass. Back North to Polana in Poland and Naimakka, a weather station, in Sweden (you can read about Naimakka’s resident via Google Translate).

To England next with Hilbre Island and Steep Holm (we’re half way through, hope you can keep up!) Scotland is next on the list with Eilean Donan (once home to Connor MacLeod), Forewick Holm, Innis Chonan, Sanda and Shuna.

Finally, to the final country on our tour, the United States, where the state of Maine has Criehaven and Hibberts Gore, Minnesota has Kiel Township and the oddly named Township 157-30, New Hampshire has Dix’s Grant and Green’s Grant. Then there’s Bonanza in Utah, Hanks in North Dakota, Hobart Bay in Alaska, Holy City in California, Laurier in Washington state, Monowi in Nebraska and last, but by no means least, Oil Springs Reservation in New York state.

Most of the places we visited today have an entry in Wikipedia, where you can usually find more information about what happened to these places. Many of the towns are on the verge of becoming proper ghost towns, but for people in others there is a strange sense of pride that comes from being the only resident.

Locations: Alaska, Alberta, California, England, Estonia, Faroe Islands, France, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, New Zealand, Poland, Saskatchewan, Scotland, Sweden, Utah, Washington, Wyoming / Categories: Abandoned, Weirdness

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Windsor

The English Windsor is about 40km west of London. Its Castle, shown above, is justly famous – built by William the Conqueror and still used regularly by the royal family, it is both the largest inhabited castle in the world, and the palace which has been occupied for the longest period of time. We visited it back in 2006.

It bears little resemblance to Windsor, Ontario, which is most often in the news for its dwindling number of car manufacturing plants, and its increasing number of casinos designed to draw American tourists across the border from Detroit.

Cornwall

Cornwall, in England’s far south-west, is a holiday-makers paradise, with pristine beaches, soaring cliffs and picturesque villages, and is of course home to Land’s End.

It would be hard to find any similarities with Cornwall, Ontario, which has a reputation as a rough-edged town polluted by industrial waste and popular with those wanting to smuggle cigarettes across the nearby US border.

One advantage of the toxic waste dumps is that they can apparently serve as ski hills in the winter!

Waterloo

Waterloo is a municipality in Belgium where the famous Battle of Waterloo saw Napoleon’s French army defeated in 1815. A large monument marks the battleground.

The only battle of note in Waterloo, Ontario, is the one for control of the smart-phone market, with Blackberry-manufacturer RIM being based here.

Athens

The Greek capital of Athens is often called ‘the cradle of Western civilisation’ It is home to countless historic buildings and treasures, and was the birthplace of the Olympic Games.

It bears little resemblance to Athens, Ontario, which is a small farming town of 3,000 people, seemingly most famous for its corn festival held every summer. It also has a number of pleasant murals of rural life.

Tweed

The River Tweed is a bucolic waterway in the Scottish borders region. It attracts anglers from all over the world for its renowned salmon fishing.

Tweed, Ontario, is mainly noted for its amusingly-decorated fire hydrants. It was also rumoured to be a hiding place for Elvis by those who believe his death was faked, although – surprisingly – no real evidence of this has ever surfaced.

Khartum

Khartoum is the bustling capital of Sudan, with a turbulent and often lawless history on the banks of the Nile. Recent development has been spurred by income from the country’s oil wells.

It could in no way be confused with Khartum, Ontario, which is, well … not much really. If anything it’s a ghost town. It is identified on the map and there are couple of roadside signs with the town’s name, but there’s nothing between the two signs that could really define it as a community. How it got the name, we have no idea!

If you have a favourite namesake, send it to us through our submission form and it might be included in a future post!

Locations: England, Greece, Ontario, Scotland, Sudan / Categories: Buildings, Monuments, Street Views, Weirdness

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The fourth-largest island of Shetland, sparsely-populated Fetlar has a population of around 70 residents and is surrounded by cliffs and beaches. To get there from mainland Scotland, one has to take four separate ferries via Orkney, Shetland Mainland, and Unst before finally arriving on the west coast of the island.

Not far from the ferry is the historic Brough Lodge, built in 1820 by the Nicolson family. This abandoned castle-like building is a 19th century folly built upon an Iron Age foundation, and has been deteriorating for some time. Plans are underway to restore the remaining structures.

A walled facade joins the main house to a chapel and makes the building appear bigger than it actually is. Above the house on a small mound is this turreted tower, giving Brough Lodge its castle-like appearance.

Halfway along the island is the main settlement of Houbie, where things seems to be quite active for a place with a population of just seventy people. Fetlar’s primary school had just one pupil this past year, but this autumn the class size is set to triple!

One fascinating feature of Fetlar is that it’s divided between east and west by an ancient 4 km (2.5 mile) wall known as Funzie Girt, which may date all the way back to the 1st millennium BC.

No one knows precisely why it was built or what function it serves, although one theory suggests it may have served as a boundary dyke. The wall is best preserved on the uninhabited north side of the island, but this remnant near Houbie is well-preserved. Just across the road, however, it’s rather grown over.

Other dykes on the island have simply become gathering places for pigs and sheep to forage. In addition to dykes, old stone building foundations dating back hundreds of years can be found across Fetlar.

A popular tourist spot is this odd–looking rock wall known as the Funzie Geowall, which demonstrates the rare conglomerates of ancient oceanic crust that make up much of the island. The rocks in this wall are about 450 million years old.

At the east end of Fetlar is Funzie, where the cliffs and beaches slip into the North Sea.

You can learn more about Fetlar on its community website or at the school’s website.

Locations: Scotland / Categories: Buildings, Islands, Monuments, Natural Landmarks, Street Views, Structures

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We’re very glad to still be here, and would like to thank our writers past and present for all their hard work over the years, and of course all of you who have been reading the site, contributing sights and leaving comments.

We’re always interested in what our readers think of the site, so we’d like to extend this opportunity for you to send us any feedback on how you’d like us to improve the site over the coming year, either as a comment here or via our feedback form.

Thanks again for reading, we can’t wait to see where the next six years take us!

Locations: England, Scotland / Categories: Site News

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Google Street View offers glimpses of some of the most-famed distilleries in the world, while also providing some sense of the land—and water—that makes their products so unique. Also, some of these distilleries have top-notch signage and branding.

Let’s start with my own personal favourite: Laphroaig. Unfortunately, the Street View car committed the brutal error of not turning down the path onto the distillery grounds, but you can clearly see the distillery sign.

Should you find yourself on the Isle of Islay: make that turn!

Less than a kilometre to the East is the famed Lagavulin. I would say that Lagavulin is my favourite single-malt, but a bottle of Lagavulin 16 year (at least in the U.S.) costs more than twice the price of a bottle of Laphroaig 10 year—and that’s just not practical for some of us working folk. Luckily, Lagavulin is right on the main road (A846) and we can see much of the grounds:

And the distillery sign on the building:

And a tour of the distillery in progress:

Just a kilometre to the east of Lagavulin is the Ardbeg distillery. It’s also not right on the main road, but we can get a pretty good view of it—complete with grazing sheep, chimneys, and the sea.

And here’s the sign for the distillery:

The main inlet of the Isle of Islay is the Loch Indaal. On the southeastern shore of the Loch, we find Bowmore, the capital of the island and home to one of the oldest distilleries in Scotland. It’s still a relatively small operation:

And here’s the distillery gate:

On the northern coast of Loch Indaal is a recently revived distillery: Bruichladdich (pronounced Brook-laddie). Bruichladdich has maybe the best distillery sign in the world:

Look at that still! Looking directly across the street from Bruichladdich provides an excellent view of Loch Indaal.

On the eastern shore of Islay, near Port Askaig, we find the distilleries of Caol Ila and Bunnahabhain. Caol Ila is right on the water and from the street we can see their excellent distillery sign, complete with oak barrel:

Bunnahabhain is situated in an ecologically rich area, and the distillery has a beautiful view of the sound and the Isle of Jura:

The Kilchoman distillery is way over on the western shore of Islay, the most westerly distillery in Scotland. It’s also one of the newest, having been founded in 2005. You can barely see the distillery from the road.

If you’re in the neighborhood, the small town of Kilchoman is also home to a spectacular old graveyard and abandoned church.

The newest distillery on Islay is in Port Charlotte. The project is owned by Bruichladdich and they are taking a serious approach to perfecting their craft with the new distillery.

Each of the whisky-producing regions of Scotland is full of history and unique geography. The Isle of Islay and its peaty whiskies are just one of the many wonders of Scotland’s whisky industry.

Locations: Scotland / Categories: Buildings, Natural Landmarks, Street Views

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Glasgow airport in Scotland have their fire training centre conveniently located next to a road, giving us a great look at it from Street View.

From this we can clearly see that, while some airports may use abandoned or decommissioned planes for training, in many cases it is merely a ‘plane-shaped object’ that can withstand repeatedly being set on fire – though convincing enough to upset a nervous flyer, particularly if it happened to be ablaze as you taxied past! Nearby is a small collection of old and wrecked cars – perhaps used to practice extractions?

At Zurich Airport there is an old DC-8 which looks to be in relatively good shape, so is probably used for evacuation exercises rather than fire training (which likely happens at the smaller object just to the east).

Another ‘plane-shaped object’, complete with a couple of fire trucks can be found at Leeds-Bradford Airport, a mere 150m from a runway!

The sprawling airport in Denver has 4 fire stations and the impressively titled Denver International Airport/Denver Fire Department Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) Training Academy, with a full-size plane mockup.

A similar training school can be found at Durham Tees Valley Airport which has a veritable array of old planes and ‘plane-shaped objects’.

Recently, the trend has been for airports to invest in expensive training systems that can challenge firefighters with a range of different situations. At Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam there is a full-size mock up of a 747, in an area clearly marked Fire Training, which has 20 computer-controlled fire training settings. There is also a very similar system at London’s Gatwick Airport.

Manchester Airport has a high-tech system from a different manufacturer, that also resembles the front two-thirds of a 747.

We previously covered some of these “Fat Planes” back in 2006, but let us know what other training locations you can find on Google Maps or Street View. Bonus points if you can find one that is actually on fire!

(I shall now sit quietly and wait to see if spending a couple of hours browsing maps and street views of airport security perimeters has attracted the attention of the government’s online monitors).

Locations: Colorado, England, Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland / Categories: Aircraft, Street Views

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Today we’re very proud to bring the new design to everyone. Here’s some of the highlights:

• Embedded maps and streetviews on all articles
• We’ll be able to have larger thumbnail images on future posts
• Links in posts indicate if they’ll take you to our map page to view the location full screen
• Embedded Streetviews that we’ve published on our Twitter page²

Some of you have been helping us beta test the new site over the last few weeks, and thanks to your passionate feedback, we’ve made a number of improvements based on your ideas; providing a cleaner, less cluttered layout, as well as better compatibility on smaller screen sizes.

We’d still love to hear your feedback and ideas for further developments over at our feedback forum, and we’ve got even more improvements lined up now that the new design is in place.

We’re also going to be running another recruitment drive for freelance writers to become part of the team here at Google Sightseeing, so that we can increase the amount of articles we can publish. Contact us for more details if you’re a budding technology/travel writer!

Thanks for your patience during this transitional period, we’ll get back to posting sights now…

Locations: England, Scotland / Categories: Site News

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Located in Outer Hebrides, Scotland, Barra Eoligarry Airport is a commercial airport with three runways located in a shallow tidal bay called Traigh Mhòr. Between the high tides that fill the bay, the water recedes far enough to expose a wide area of hard compact sand where planes have been landing since 1933.

The airport has a control tower positioned near the edge of the beach, a parking area for guests, and a small terminal building for arriving and departing passengers. Google’s Street View car passed by on what looks like an absolutely beautiful day, but unfortunately no aircraft were to be seen.

The airport’s three sandy runways are laid out in a crossing pattern which gives pilots flexibility based on the bay’s current wind conditions. Airport officials marked the end of each runway with wooden poles stuck in the sand because normal ground markings would be washed away by the twice-a-day tidal swings. There are some runway number signs however that can also been seen from the street view car, but they are positioned on land well away from the washing effect of the ocean.

Large windsocks near the end of each runway are displayed when aircraft are approaching the airport. This not only gives the pilots a glimpse at wind direction, but also gives visitors on the beach a chance to get out of the way! Once again, out street view driver missed out on seeing the actual windsock, but the “Keep off the beach” sign is clearly visible at the entrance.

Barra’s airport offers daily flights to Benbecula and Glasgow with Flybe¹ and, if you want to book a trip, the airport code is BRR.

For more information, see our previous coverage, the airport’s website or Wikipedia.

Locations: Scotland / Categories: Aircraft, Street Views, Weirdness

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More bizarre however are Google’s efforts to remove all traces of him!

When Google first launched UK Street View, we were delighted to find a photo of the The Stig apparently hanging out at the BBC. We were a little crushed upon discovery that is simply a cardboard cutout of the famously reclusive driver.

Then, when Street View visited the roads around Loch Ness, the actual honest-to-goodness real Stig was found!

Clearly he had been waiting there for the Google car – but why? Whatever the reason, Google didn’t like it; within a few days the Stig’s entire personage had been pixellated beyond recognition (clearly blurring his face wasn’t going to be very effective).

If we revisit the banks of Loch Ness today we find that Google has since gone even further, and has completely removed the section of imagery in which the blurry Stig appeared.

But the Stig cannot be silenced! (Well metaphorically, seeing as how he doesn’t talk).

Just yesterday Google launched new Trike-captured imagery of Windsor’s Legoland theme park – and waiting behind a Lego model of London – it’s Street View Stig!

Clearly he wasn’t happy with his on-camera performance – because elsewhere we find him sitting atop a Lego Camel (not going anywhere very fast), and posing in front of a huge statue.

Already these images are being blurred out very soon after they are discovered – but why is the Stig so desperate to be seen, and why are Google so determined to make sure he isn’t?

The most important question of all however, is how does Stig know where the Street View camera is going to be?¹

Update: Google Maps Mania also found the Stig in his natural habitat – driving a racing car (although normally they aren’t made of Lego).

Locations: England, Scotland / Categories: Street Views

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The island service is like a bus route, transporting residents, students and tourists around the Orkney islands. Tourists who take the flight are apparently presented with a certificate signed by the captain and a souvenir bottle of Orkney whisky to commemorate the occasion. The whole sightseeing trip costs £39 return (yes, including taxes).

A single flight produces approximately 0.1 tonnes (224 lb) of CO^₂ which would cost around £1.15 ($1.74) to offset under the UK Government’s carbon offsetting assurance scheme.

By contrast, flight SQ21 between New York’s Newark and Singapore airports, operated by Singapore Airlines, is the world’s longest commercial flight – covering 9,523 miles (15,325 km) in around 18 hours and 40 minutes.

One way economy, this trip costs £2,610.14 ($3,903), and produces 1.9 tonnes of CO^₂ – which can be offset for just £21.85 ($33.32).

Watch a (very short) video of the world’s shortest commercial flight on YouTube. Or for bookings, see the summer 2010 schedule.

Locations: New Jersey, Scotland, Singapore / Categories: Aircraft, Islands

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