When the Romans invaded Britain in the 1st century AD, they never quite managed to conquer Caledonia – the area now known as Scotland.

We’ll never know whether the Roman army felt it was too much like hard work to defeat the fearsome northern tribes, or were simply under-attired for the fearsome Scottish weather; either way, in AD 122 the Roman Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a wall to defend his territory from the lands to the north.

Hadrian’s Wall stretched for 80 Roman miles (73.5 modern-day miles, or 117km), from the Solway Firth (where the wall is still visible) to the River Tyne (where the wall has vanished, but the fort of Segedunum, which marked its eastern end, has been excavated).

Despite being almost 2,000 years old (and having been heavily plundered by the locals for building materials after the Romans left), a surprising amount of the wall can still be seen today. One of the best preserved stretches is near the village of Gilsland. Here you can also see the foundations of the Roman bridge across the River Irthing – although since it was built the course of the river has shifted westwards.

There are an astonishing number of Roman sites in this area, as a look at the Ordnance Survey map shows. Among them are Birdoswald fort; the nicely preserved milecastle 48¹ (right next to the spot where the railway line slices through the wall); and a couple of Roman camps. The shadows on the aerial photography really show up the traces of old structures and ditches, even where there is little else left on the ground.

The wall was not a single structure: at various stages in its history it was extended, and separate banks and ditches added. Among the later additions was the Vallum, consisting of three earth banks separated by ditches, running parallel to the wall a few hundred metres to the south. The surviving stretches also show up well in aerial imagery; if you scroll northwards from this point you can see the wall itself.

In many places, the builders used the natural topography to help create a formidable barrier. One spectacular stretch of wall follows a steep rocky ridge, Highshield Crags.

The low angle of the sun creates some dramatic shadows here – and if you zoom right in, you can see the shadow of a sycamore tree in the hollow between two ridges. This location, known as Sycamore Gap, will be familiar to fans of the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: it’s the spot where Kevin Costner rescued a small boy from the dastardly Guy of Gisbourne.²

Read more about Hadrian’s Wall at Wikipedia. The 84-mile-long Hadrian’s Wall Path National Trail follows the course of the wall, and its website has a great gallery of ground-level photos.

A well known landmark to locals and holidaymakers is the little house that sits atop an island off the shore of Towan Beach in Newquay, England. Featured in many postcards, “The Island House”, as it is known, has become symbolic of Newquay itself.

The Island has been used as a rather small potato farm, a chicken run, a Sunday School classroom, an art gallery, a guest house, and a tea room. However, today it is the home of the 4th Viscount Long and his wife Lady Helen.

To get to the Island House one must cross a 30-metre long miniature suspension foot bridge.

The footbridge was supposedly modelled after the suspension bridge in Bristol.

The Island was kept from being entered into Guinness as the “World’s Smallest Full-time Inhabited Island” by a European Union directive in 2003 that classified islands as having at least fifty people living on them. So the Island House should actually be called the Outcrop House.

Lady Helen once quipped,

Being referred to as Lady of the Outcrop sounds like I have a bad case of chickenpox.

Headington, a suburb of the famous university city of Oxford, is the only known habitat of the aerial shark, a rare but fearsome predator that dives on its unsuspecting victims from heights of over a quarter of a mile. Incredibly, Google’s Street View car has managed to capture the aftermath of a horrific aerial shark attack!

Okay, we made that up. This 25ft-long shark is actually made out of fibreglass¹, and was thrust through the roof of number 2 New High Street in 1986 in the name of art. Bill Heine, who commissioned the sculpture and still owns the house, says he did it “to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation… It is saying something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki.”

The shark has since become a local landmark, but it nearly didn’t survive: soon after it was erected, Oxford City Council ruled that putting a shark through your roof without planning permission simply wouldn’t do, and ordered it to be taken down. Bill appealed, and in a rare show of common sense, the government decided it could stay².

Unfortunately, when the Street View image was captured, the house was covered in scaffolding. To see it in all its glory, go to the official shark site.

Thanks to Cyan and Julian.

While many malls, theme parks and stadiums may boast large car parks, most pale in comparison to car storage facilities like the one at the former RAF base in Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire.

After 43 years of service to British and US forces, the base was closed in 1993. Today the runways, taxiways and stands are home to countless¹ thousands of cars and other vehicles. Just off the main runway we can even see a transport truck delivering or removing some vehicles.

Further west, Royal Portbury Dock in Bristol handles well over half a million vehicles every year, with areas dedicated to many of the major car manufacturers.

Many of the vehicles have white plastic covers to protect the bodywork during shipping. And on the quayside cars are being loaded onto a ship for transport.

Although there’s always one person who doesn’t read the memo about colour-coordinated parking, isn’t there?

In the port of Vancouver we find a similar operation, with the north-eastern end of Annacis Island serving as a rail / sea terminal for vehicles.

We see rail cars and a ship with ramps deployed to receive or unload vehicles.

And again, there’s always one…

Where are the largest car parks in your part of the world?

Thanks to Gareth Smart and Fabio Ferrari.

The Jurassic Coast is a 153 km stretch of the English Channel coastline that is world renowned for the incredibly diverse nature of its geology – so much so that in 2001 it became only the second natural landmark in the UK to be granted protection as a World Heritage Site.

The site stretches from Orcombe Point near Exmouth all the way to to Old Harry Rocks near Swanage, and its entire length can be walked on the South West Coast Path, with some wonderful sights to see along the way.

Lulworth Cove

The coastline at Lulworth Cove is concordant, meaning that through movements in the earth’s crust layers of rock have been folded up parallel with the sea.

The entrance to the cove is through a limestone strata, that was widened through erosion by both the sea and glacial melt waters. As the entrance gradually increased in size the softer clay behind was eroded more quickly, giving rise to the spectacular cove we see today.

Just to the west is Stair Hole, which is one of the finest examples of limestone folding in the world, and which lets us see how Lulworth cove would have looked only a few hundred thousand years ago.

Durdle Door

A couple of miles further west is the spectacular limestone arch known as Durdle Door, which has featured in many music videos and several movies.

Here the limestone strata is thinner and has been more severely eroded – and where it is thinnest it has been eroded right through to form Durdle Door. Taking a more general overview of this area we can clearly see the remnants of the original course of the limestone.

Black Ven

Black Ven is one of the largest active landslips in Europe, parts of which continue to get lost to the sea, and it’s famous for the abundance of fossils that are revealed as the cliffs continue to crumble.

The fossil history here is incredibly rich – for example it was in the nearby town of Lyme Regis that the first complete Ichthyosaur fossil was discovered, and I have personally walked out onto the beach at Lyme, cracked open a rock, and found a fossil of my own.

Other history

For Geologists and Paelentologists the Jurassic coast really is a dream come true – we could go on for hours about places like Ballard Cliff, Chesil Beach and the Isle of Portland. We’ve not even touched upon human history here, like when during World War II several sections of the Jurassic Coast became property of the Ministry of War, leading to the abandonment of the village of Tyneham.

While there’s nothing quite like visiting somewhere like this in person, Wikipedia has enough about the Jurassic Coast to keep you clicking around for hours. Also, the official Jurassic Coast website has a wealth of information!

Thanks to many a BBC documentary, Laurence Madill, my high school geography teacher Mr. Woods, and several holidays of my own.