UK Coastal Tour

[lazymanc]

Has anyone done a full circuit of the UK sticking as close to the coast as possible without leaving the tarmac?

The t'interwebs reckons the mainland coastline is about 17,000km according to the Ordnance Survey records, so I'd imagine it's probably something more like 10-12,000km once you take out all the wobbly bits the roads cut off.

Obviously that's a massive distance to cover, so I think doing it in sections counts as well

I think Steve_God did something similar, but it wasn't quite so far

Originally Posted by lazymanc

Has anyone done a full circuit of the UK sticking as close to the coast as possible without leaving the tarmac?

The t'interwebs reckons the mainland coastline is about 17,000km according to the Ordnance Survey records, so I'd imagine it's probably something more like 10-12,000km once you take out all the wobbly bits the roads cut off.

Obviously that's a massive distance to cover, so I think doing it in sections counts as well

Are you sure about them figures, the worlds only 26000 miles in circumference, that sounds a bit far, and the long way round trip that ewan and charlie done wasnt that far

Originally Posted by specialone

Are you sure about them figures, the worlds only 26000 miles in circumference, that sounds a bit far, and the long way round trip that ewan and charlie done wasnt that far

According to the BBC Coast programme, the length of the UK coastline id infinite; I think 17,000 km is getting away lightly!

I feel some time on google maps coming on

Speaking in the abstract, the border of the UK is a fractal. It repeats a certain pattern to infinity as you zoom in more and more. It is basically a finite area bounded by an infinite barrier. So you can choose any length from 0 to infinity, with the starting point of 0 obtained by choosing an approximation of the true border with a distance large enough such that you can shrink it to a single point...

But back to the real world, you can only zoom in down to (and back in abstract, maybe) string level.. You can see the effect of fractal bounding like this :

1. Choose a triangle. Say you chose an equilateral one. Say it's perimeter is 3 * L (L is the length of one side).
2. For every side of the triangle: divide it by 3, replace the middle section with another equilateral triangle with the length of the sides equal to L/3. So now the perimeter has increased to (3 * L - L) + 2 * L = 4 * L (obtaining a David's star), and the area has increased to A + A / 3 = 4 * A / 3.
3. Repeat the procedure for every side of the new polygon.
4. Go back to step 3.

So, at the n-th iteration, you get [(4/3)^n] * L perimeter and A + A/3 * [SUM_(n_1) ( (4/9)^i )]. So, the perimeter -> infinity, and the area -> A * (8/5) = A * 1.6. And it can be shown that all of this occurs within a fixed circle (so the constructed object is not unbounded)...

UK (and any other country for that matter) is like the starting triangle. When you start looking into the details (say, at iteration 2 you add the speckles of sand, the you add the atoms on the border of the sand etc), you get and infinite border... So no, google maps won't help with the exact value

Okay, so I don't know the actual coastline length and have just written a geek's post. So, what is the coastline length measured on the roads closest to it...?

The Romanian coastline is somewhere around 400km ~ 240miles.. I think... don't know for sure...

Tarmac and coastline are two completely different things. Coastline takes in every inlet,cove river estuary where as tarmac misses most of this. I have been right round Scotland on coast roads and done farthest North-South-East -and West on the UK Mainland---My "estimate" would be around 8000 miles