The Chuffington Post

The Bard of Barnsley, Ian McMillan, states in his book Neither Nowt Nor Summat that more people live in Yorkshire than in Scotland. Is he right? Let's check, shall we? According to the 2011 census Yorkshire had 5,288,200 inhabitants. That's North, South, West & East Yorkshire rather than the ceremonial county which would still include Middlesbrough and other bits of what is now called Cleveland. Scotland's population was 5,313.600. Ooh, that's close. And a bit of a surprise to me, to be honest. Only 4 of Scotland's cities are in the Top 50 most inhabited towns & cities in the UK, with Dundee only just making the cut in 47th place. Glasgow comes third and Edinburgh 9th, and Aberdeen pops up at number 29, but Yorkshire has Sheffield (6th), Leeds (8th), Bradford (11th), Hull (15th), Huddersfield (40th) and York (45th). Places 51 to 100 include no Scottish places at all but Doncaster, Rotherham, Wakefield, Barnsley and Halifax are all in there. Something...

...that the warmest place in Britain yesterday was London; the coldest was Eskdalemuir, Dumfriesshire. And it frequently was; in fact I was disappointed on the odd day that Eskdalemuir was not the coldest place in the country. Sometimes some other pretender like Aberdeen or Stranraer would claim the prize instead, but I wasn't having that, and I resolved that one day I would go there and find out the truth for myself, so today I fulfilled a lifelong dream. I have been to Eskdalemuir. Of course you've got to get there first, which probably means going to Langholm; at least that's what our road atlas told us. We should have taken the A7. If you ever want to go to Langholm from the South, my advice is to take the A7 because the other roads that appear on your map are cunningly disguised to send you in the wrong direction. At one point I calculated that we were 4 miles away, only for a road sign to point back to where we had come from and give us the unwelcome message LAN...