Trouble with Reviewer 2? Why not carve your alternative theory into the side of your house instead? (seen on a facade on New Street, Scalloway, Shetland)

tfw a huge Grade B listed country house is just not big enough for you, your family and your helicopter. Balgray House, East Renfrewshire; the original house is the top of the C-section complex. What looks like the courtyard is the roof of a structure, so 3x size? * www.nvdc.co.uk/balgray-house

Cricket ground - top left - mimicing an Iron Age scooped settlement (bottom right). Easy mistake to make. Balgray Cleuchheads, Dumfries and Galloway. * maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/...

In which the famer had some fun. Hetlandhill, Carrutherstown, Dumfries and Galloway.

Nice Iron Age scooped settlement you have there. Shame if it was completely obscured by a spruce plantation of negligible value. (Part #837 in an endless series of wholly avoidable shit.) Shiel Burn in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. * maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/... * www.trove.scot/place/67307

Was wondering why & on what authority Quholme (Rackwick, Hoy, Orkneys) had been renamed Bunnertoon by Ordnance Survey (as you do). Seems to be that Peter Maxwell Davies ascribed that name to the cottage when he restored & lived in it. * maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/...

Corn drying kiln, it being rather wet much of the time on Hoy, Orkney, Scotland. Probably owned by a clergyman, built on glebe land. Post-medieval, Canmore says. A nearby manse, they say, is 18th-century. * www.google.com/maps/place/H...

Cropmarks ftw. The Grange Bronze age Class I henge in Balmerino, Fife, Scotland, doesn't care about your ploughing. 2,700 or more years old. * www.bing.com/maps/search?...

Shite cartography, OpenStreetMaps. Huge slurry tank at Dalwinton Roads, Dumfries and Galloway, represented by a tiny icon. * www.openstreetmap.org#map=19/55.14...

BBC News website actively preferring and promoting Kristi Noem's version of the Pretti killing, by omitting a key paragraph in his parents' note and inserting Noem's falsehoods.

Manny Shinwell's racism not featured in his Wikipedia article. Whitewash, as it were.

Nice Neolithic class II henge you have there. Shame if anyone were to fill in parts of the ditch to construct golf bunkers, and place a putting green in its centre. Castle Hill Henge, now hole 13 of the Muir of Ord Golf Club, Highland, Scotland. * maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/...

Ofcom, the parliament that passed the Online Safety Act, and Starmer's cabinet all busy brushing this under the carpet as if industrial-scale CSAM and revenge porn was not happening. Regulation and government by quislings.

In the UK, we have Robert Jenrick, the Telegraph and Matt Goodwin doing exactly the same thing..

Not Thunderbirds, but you could be forgiven. The Ryan X-13 Vertijet (aka Model 69; nice.)

For those of you unclear why some of us are distinctly concerned about a digital ID system in the UK, this is what our Home Secretary is currently thinking about. www.thenational.scot/news/2578000...

Patrick O’Donovan needs to resign. Man's not fit for purpose.

Don't even know where to begin. The Saltire Society Civil Engineering Award for, I think, Paisley's 1993 St James Motorway Interchange (but also its 1832 cholera pandemic?). File under wtf, or civic pride, or idk, what were you thinking?

Do you know of a museum, library, or archive that offers images from their collection for publication or presenting, for free? Please use the form below to help crowd-source a list of these magical places!

📆 It's now 2026, which means it is over 50 years since 2025. Hats off to the @natlibscot.bsky.social Map Library for getting the latest batch of out-of-copyright large scale OS maps online already! maps.nls.uk/additions/#191 🗺️🎉

This sailed under my radar; apparently 1,000 memorial beacons placed around the UK as part of a nationwide remembrance project to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War. Who knew?

Oh beautiful bridge on the river Moray! You have fallen down, and I'm sorry to say That our public finances are in such disarray It seems (as of the date I write this rhyme) You will remain down for a very long time

Bad news for Firefox users; Mozilla's new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, doesn't understand or doesn't care about the browser's USP. Modern AI browser my arse, @mozilla.org.

Regret to report a fair amount of McGonagalling on Bluesky rueing this bridge failure.

Scottish mining memorials, 127 of. * overpass-turbo.eu/s/2gSk

Honestly impressed with Google AI Studio's OCRing & presentation of various pages from a ~1870 Ordnance Survey Name Book. Interesting morning spent trying to school it out of errors, wherein it was a) prone to regression failures and b) slippery as an eel. Can see why it's a substitute for crack.

tfw you've definitely tested your crossword puzzle UI on Firefox, @theobserveruk.bsky.social

Google helpfully showing a picture of Edlingham against a search for Eglingham, b/c it's a halfwit.

Jane Haining's Stolperstein (tr: stumble-stone) mapped on OpenStreetMaps, one amongst now more than 46,000 across Europe. * overpass-turbo.eu/s/2g7n

Fear I may have done for poor Ian at Highland HER, who made the mistake of taking the weekend off :(

Not clear, but possible Gaelic nationalism detected on Finlay Cook's memorial in Reay Old Cemetery; Fionnagh being the Gaelic rendering, afaik. * www.geograph.org.uk/photo/7171975

'To lose one child, Sir Hector, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.' * her.highland.gov.uk/api/LibraryL...

I have for some time been pondering Dr. Grosvenor's objection to a proposed solar farm in the Scottish Borders. bsky.app/profile/bend...

Oddly the Duke(s) of Sutherland tie both the Slater & Ward tragedies together; Ward was the 4th daughter of the 4th Duke of. The 2nd Duke of was probably responsible for Slater's memorial; his surveyors worked closely with Slater's protégé and replacement, Henry Otter bsky.app/profile/tagi...

Thing about mapping memorials is the desperately sad circumstances of many of them. Here's one to Cmdr Michael Slater, Admiralty surveyor who from 1828-42 mapped much of the east coast of Scotland, until he reached the north coast at Holburnhead, where he jumped off a 250' cliff, for reasons.

Morning's work was mainly figuring out that the memorial stele to William and Elspeth Beardmore - lost as far as Canmore and Highland HER are concerned - is most probably in the post-1900 burial ground at Flichity. AMA. * www.trove.scot/place/164800 * maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/...

A simple little hack for laundering Ordnance Survey Grid References so as to get to locations on Google Maps, Bing Maps, OpenStreetMaps, and others which have no truck with OSGR, is to search in Geograph.org.uk and use its excellent mapping links page.

Unclear why Inverness thought Duncan I of Scotland (of Macbeth fame) was buried on Culcabock Avenue, just behind the Spar shop, what with him being killed & interred somewhere Elgin way and then supposedly reburied on Iona. * www.google.com/maps/@57.473...

Inverness's type 1/A CWGC Cross of Sacrifice, found in Tomnahurich Cemetery, looking a little blurry in this Geograph image.

"Gloomy Memories" (1857) - 212 small font pages of Donald MacLeod being *extremely* pissed off with the Duke of Sutherland (for the Highland Clearances), and later Harriet Beecher Stowe (for defending the Duke). Has occasional paragraph breaks. * archive.org/details/dona...

Most recently reported Multiverse results: loss of £60.6 million on a turnover of £58.4 million. Normal for a supposed £1.2 billion company in its 9th year of operation and which has never made any profit. Britain's #1 failson, MBE, speaks...

The Muir of Dinnet wallet inspector. You have been warned. * www.google.co.uk/maps/@57.087...

The Bel Memorial at St Nidan's Kirk, Midmar, Aberdeenshire. It celebrates a family of master masons who would be horrified by the typography of the inset tablet - a chunk of badly positioned left justified text in a plain san-serif font with dubious kerning & line spacing. Carved Microsoft Word.

Remembrance Sunday. 🧵

tfw it's 1877, you're the Laird of Glen Tanar, and you manage to down an elusive stag at 267 yards. "the gentleman, not known for his modesty, had two memorials erected to himself: one where he stood and one where the poor beast fell." * www.openstreetmap.org/node/1328601...

Why yes, I am the author of green ink email missives to @diggermann.bsky.social's people in Aberdeenshire on discovering rifts in the HER spacetime continuum. * online.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/smrpub/maste... * online.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/smrpub/maste...

A rather fine 1961 teak & copper memorial shelter topped by a Rod of Asclepius weather-vane, in Laurencekirk, Aberdeenshire; remembering one Dr T. K. Buchan, who served the local community as a doctor from 1916 to 1958. * www.google.com/maps/place/L...

Just the most barking mad scheme, which seemed to boil down to "oh, so you have a public park / common do you? ... we'll be putting a dual carriageway across that". Sabre's new map: www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/index.p...

In which it's suggested that the not very good Trove website may have cost £2M.

One of two Congregational Church Memorial Halls on Baltic Street, Montrose - motto "All were others, All will be others" - arising from now difficult to understand schisms amongst independent-minded Scottish believers; this group part of the 1843 Evangelical Union splinter afaics.