Borders

richardjjd

Hello

I was looking at the ROI/NI border last night and was wondering if there any other borders which follow such a undulating course. In this example, the border crosses a straight line 8 times in 3,700m. A second example has 9 crossings in 900m. Not looking for a political discussion (!), just finding the route it takes fascinating and was looking for other examples.

Sundy

Is it following a natural feature like a river?

number10a

The second one seems to be following a river alright.

The Croatian/Hungarian border follows quite a strange course. It seems that the river changed course over time but the border stayed the same, effectively cutting pieces of land off from the rest of the country. Link

Croatia's border with Serbia is much the same. Link

El Siglo

Sundy wrote: »

Is it following a natural feature like a river?

Well historically the counties would have been delimited by some natural features like rivers (e.g. Laois and Offaly are divided by the Barrow in some parts, with towns like Portarlington effectively in two counties). However the counties would have been created for various resource and control uses (e.g. 16th century, Ireland had a fairly restless population during the Tudor reconquest) so the counties were put in place to effectively control the population while splitting the land into manageable units (i.e. counties with the best land for agricultural purposes would have smaller and more numerous townlands than counties with poorer land). That's pretty much my knowledge, I haven't studied the subject in a long time.

ManAboutCouch

richardjjd wrote: »

...In this example, the border crosses a straight line 8 times in 3,700m...

The area of ROI just north of your line is a slightly famous quirk alright, known as Drummully Polyp, or Coleman’s Island. The excellent Strange Maps blog featured it a couple of years ago.

richardjjd

ManAboutCouch wrote: »

The area of ROI just north of your line is a slightly famous quirk alright, known as Drummully Polyp, or Coleman’s Island. The excellent Strange Maps blog featured it a couple of years ago.

What a phenomenal find! That blog is destined to become a favourite. Thank you.

ManAboutCouch

You're welcome. The blog has been turned into a book too, I have a copy and it's great.

It's on Amazon if you're interested.

ardmacha

An Irish county boundary could reflect a landlords property or the like.

There is the bulge of Lithuania into Belarus which is supposed to have arisen because Stalin left his pipe on the map when they were drawing it up and nobody felt able to ask him to move it!!