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When I said it was easy, in reality it was pretty damn difficult and time consuming and it took me days to find them all. Even now I'm not sure about one or two - some of them are names of more than a single place (for example, there are two "Holy Island"'s and two beaches known as "Hell's Mouth", and there are a number of places you can find "Phoenix Caisson"'s which were concrete harbours built during WW2). Other places were fiendishly difficult to pin down ("The Road", "The Neck" and "The Scalp" were particularly tricky, and I often discovered them by accident rather than after exhaustive internet searches - I eventually found a small stretch of beach in North Devon called "The Neck" when we were staying with some friends at Anderton House in Goodleigh, and I was studying an Ordnance Survey map under a sheet of glass on one of the tables).
For months I was sure that there were two fake place names. "Spliff Island" was the most obvious, and "Moist Covert" yielded some very strange suggestions on Google. One night as I was re-reading "Do It For Your Mum", the excellent memoir of BSP's early years by Hamilton and Scott's older brother Roy. Chapter three is titled "Nettle monger on the approaches to Spliff Island" *bingo* All I needed to do now was find the campsite in Hopeman, head down to the beach and look for a rocky outcrop and make an educated guess at which one looks comfortable enough to have a joint on.
Another place name that really confused me was "The Cob". For ages, I just assumed whoever compiled the list had made a spelling error, or when the list went off to the printers, they made the error and what it was meant to say was "The Cobb"; the Cobb being the breakwater made famous by "The French Lieutenant's Woman" with the iconic picture of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons having a snog in a storm. Turns out there IS a road bridge known as the Cob in Wales which takes you from Porthmadog to Portmeirion. There is even a shop (which I'm hoping is still there) called Cob Records. I only found this out when doing a bit of route planning, but these little discoveries please me no end.
While planning the trip, I discovered that you can only take a boat trip out to "The Royal Sovereign" during the month of August. The Royal Sovereign is a huge lighthouse out in the English Channel that can be seen all along the coast from Eastbourne to Hastings. Prior to 1971, the light came from a light vessel that had been there since 1875. I spent a very miserable few years as a boarder at a Prep School in Eastbourne, and would often stare out the window and look at the light coming from the Royal Sovereign. Doing a boat trip to get close would be fantastic, but much to my dismay, Trinity House, the company who run many of Britain's lighthouses have announced that they are going to decommission and dismantle the lighthouse this spring. I felt really quite sad about this news, as by the time I finally get Germinal CCXXIV on the road, it will be no more.
The only place I'll never be able to visit (unless I have a huge Lottery win) is "Rockall". It's a rock somewhat dubiously claimed by the British Government that is 290 odd miles out in the Atlantic off the coast of Scotland. There are intrepid types offering a boat trip out there, but it costs a packet.
As for the rest, well, they should all be all be either visitable or in the case of some of the most inaccessible, at least visible from the nearest bit of coast or from going on a boat trip.
I do love a good list.
