50 Fun Facts About UK Counties

Which county faces France across the Strait of Dover and contains Canterbury, seat of England's senior archbishop?

Kent is where Saint Augustine landed in the 6th century to begin converting the English, becoming the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

Which county holds Land's End, Tintagel Castle and the vast greenhouse domes of the Eden Project?

Cornwall kept its own Celtic language, which died out as a community tongue at the end of the 18th century and has since been revived.

Which Scottish county, still styled a kingdom after its Pictish past, holds St Andrews, the home of golf?

Fife is home to The R&A at St Andrews, the body that governs golf everywhere in the world except the United States and Mexico.

Which County Antrim landmark of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986?

Giant's Causeway was, in legend, built by the Irish hero Finn MacCool after a Scottish rival called Benandonner challenged him to a fight.

Which mountain, the highest in Wales, can be climbed by a rack railway that starts at Llanberis in Gwynedd?

Snowdon has carried passengers to its summit by train since 1896, on the only public rack-and-pinion railway in the United Kingdom.

Which lake, the largest in the British Isles, has shores in five of Northern Ireland's six counties?

Lough Neagh supports a centuries-old eel fishery whose catch swims some 4,000 miles from the Sargasso Sea and now holds protected status.

What name, from an Old Norse word for a third part, was given to the three historic divisions of Yorkshire?

Ridings were treated in many ways as separate counties, each with its own quarter sessions and lieutenancy; Yorkshire's were North, West and East.

Which county gave the world Cheddar cheese, named after a village beside a gorge full of cool caves?

Somerset's Cheddar Gorge caves gave the steady temperature and humidity that suited maturing cheese, and some cheddar is still aged in them.

Which county, called Ynys Môn in Welsh, holds the village with the longest place name in the UK?

Anglesey's 58-character village name was supposedly contrived in 1869 as a publicity stunt, to give its station the longest name in Britain.

Which Dumfriesshire village beside the English border became famous for runaway weddings over a blacksmith's anvil?

Gretna Green's wedding trade began in 1754, when Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act tightened the rules in England but did not apply in Scotland.

Which county holds Sandringham, the royal estate where the first royal Christmas broadcast was made?

Norfolk's countryside around Sandringham appealed to Princess Alexandra, the future queen, because it reminded her of her native Denmark.

Which county's resort of Southend-on-Sea has the longest pleasure pier in the world, served by its own railway?

Essex nearly lost its great pier after fires in the 1970s, but protests kept it open and Princess Anne reopened its railway in 1986.

Which small English county expects royalty and peers passing through its county town to hand over a horseshoe?

Rutland was given a vast reservoir in the 1970s, Rutland Water, which now doubles as a nature reserve where ospreys breed.

Which county, created in 1974, holds the Lake District, England's largest national park and home of the Lake Poets?

Cumbria was assembled from Cumberland, Westmorland, the Furness part of Lancashire and a small slice of Yorkshire.

Which English county bordering Scotland holds the tidal Holy Island of Lindisfarne and part of Hadrian's Wall?

Northumberland's place on a contested border left it with more castles than any other English county, including Alnwick and Bamburgh.

Which county was the birthplace of Isaac Newton and the place where the world's first tank was built?

Lincolnshire's Woolsthorpe Manor, where Newton was born, still has an apple tree that analysis suggests is the one he described.

Which county holds Ironbridge Gorge, where the world's first major cast-iron bridge opened over the Severn in 1781?

Shropshire became an early centre of industry after Abraham Darby first smelted iron ore with coke at Coalbrookdale in 1709.

Which county gave its name to the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold yet found, unearthed near Lichfield in 2009?

Staffordshire's treasure was found by a man with a metal detector on recently ploughed farmland, and it outweighs the gold from Sutton Hoo.

Which county contains the whole of Dartmoor, the granite moorland where The Hound of the Baskervilles is set?

Devon's Dartmoor Prison at Princetown was built to hold prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars, and later held thousands of American sailors captured in the War of 1812.

Which English county is commonly given the prefix 'County', a style far more usual in Ireland?

Durham owes its unusual style to its bishops, who for centuries ruled it as a county palatine with the right to raise an army and mint coins.

Which county stages an annual race in which runners chase a wheel of cheese down the steep Cooper's Hill?

Gloucestershire's rolling cheese gets a one-second head start and is never actually caught, so the first runner to the bottom wins it.

Which Hampshire cathedral city, rebuilt on a new street grid by Alfred the Great, is the county town?

Winchester Cathedral is the burial place of early kings, among them Egbert of Wessex, Canute and William Rufus.

Which Lake District peak, climbed in the National Three Peaks Challenge, is the highest mountain in England?

Scafell Pike was not known to be England's highest ground until the early 1800s, and early surveyors labelled it only as a higher top of Sca Fell.

What collective name is given to the ring of shires around London, such as Surrey, Hertfordshire and Berkshire?

Home Counties may take the name from the Home Circuit of courts that once ringed London, though the origin of the term is uncertain.

Which Dorset county town was fictionalised as Casterbridge in the novels of Thomas Hardy?

Dorchester still has Max Gate, the house on its outskirts that Hardy designed for himself and lived in until his death in 1928.

Which port city became the first town in England to be made a county in its own right, in 1373?

Bristol had been divided between two neighbouring shires until Edward III's charter made the town a county of its own.

Which prehistoric monument on Wiltshire's Salisbury Plain includes bluestones hauled about 150 miles from Wales?

Stonehenge's bluestones came from the Preseli Hills of west Wales, and a 2024 study traced its central Altar Stone further still, to the north-east of Scotland.

Which Derbyshire market town gives its name to a pudding of jam, egg and ground almond?

Bakewell's pudding is said to have begun by accident, when an inn's cook told to make a jam tart spread the egg mixture on top of the jam instead.

Which title belongs to the monarch's personal representative in a UK county, an office begun under Henry VIII?

Lord-Lieutenant began as a military post: the holder raised and commanded the county militia, a duty that was removed only in 1871.

Which county at the northern end of mainland Scotland was the scene of the largest of the Highland Clearances?

Sutherland means 'southern land', a name given in the Viking era by Norse rulers based further north, for whom it lay to the south.

Which Scottish county, nicknamed the Wee County, is the smallest historic county in Britain?

Clackmannanshire's motto, Look Aboot Ye, comes from a legend that Robert Bruce was told just that after mislaying his gauntlets there.

Which county, Scotland's largest by land area, contains both Ben Nevis and Loch Ness?

Inverness-shire also takes in Skye, which came under the Sheriff of Inverness once the Lordship of the Isles was absorbed by Scotland.

Which Scottish county holds Balmoral Castle, the Highland estate bought for the royal family by Prince Albert in 1852?

Aberdeenshire's Balmoral is the King's private property, not part of the Crown Estate, and Albert first took on its lease without seeing it.

Which Scottish county was the birthplace of Robert Burns, who was born in a cottage at Alloway?

Ayrshire's Burns Cottage still stands in Alloway, a short walk from the Brig o' Doon, the old bridge that features in his poem Tam o' Shanter.

Which Scottish county, once also called Edinburghshire, appears in the title of a Walter Scott novel?

Midlothian was reshaped in 1975, when the city of Edinburgh, long partly autonomous, was formally separated from the county.

Which Scottish county holds the Neolithic village of Skara Brae and the wartime naval anchorage of Scapa Flow?

Orkney passed to Scotland in 1472 after a Norwegian king pledged the islands as security for his daughter's dowry and the money was never paid.

Which Caithness village is traditionally paired with Land's End as the far end of mainland Britain?

John o' Groats takes its name from Jan de Groot, a 15th-century Dutchman who ran a ferry from the mainland to the northern isles.

Which lake, Great Britain's largest by surface area, formed the old boundary of Dunbartonshire and Stirlingshire?

Loch Lomond holds Inchmurrin, the largest freshwater island in the British Isles, and lies across the Highland Boundary Fault.

Which Welsh county holds St Davids, the UK's smallest city, and a national park created mainly for its coastline?

Pembrokeshire has the mildest coastal winters in Wales thanks to the warm Atlantic, and its coast path runs for about 186 miles.

Which border county was so ambiguous in status that laws long spoke of 'Wales and' this county by name?

Monmouthshire was flatly described as part of England by the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, and only a 1972 Act settled its place in Wales.

Which historic Welsh county held both Cardiff and Swansea and was split into West, Mid and South in 1974?

Glamorgan was once called the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, a world centre for iron, steel and copper with rich seams of coal.

Which county, the largest and most sparsely populated in Wales, is named after a medieval Welsh kingdom?

Powys largely follows the boundaries of three historic counties: Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire and Brecknockshire.

Which Northern Irish county, nearly a third covered by lakes and waterways, has Enniskillen as its county town?

Fermanagh lost all its railway lines in 1957, which left it the first non-island county in the UK without a train service.

Which Irish province supplies all six counties of Northern Ireland, with its other three lying in the Republic?

Ulster is often used as a name for Northern Ireland itself, even though Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan, three of its nine counties, are in the Republic.

Which County Down mountain range contains Slieve Donard, the highest peak in Northern Ireland?

Mourne Mountains summits are linked by the Mourne Wall, a dry-stone wall crossing fifteen peaks that was built to enclose a reservoir catchment.

Which Scottish local government region of 1975 to 1996 was named after an early medieval kingdom of the Britons?

Strathclyde means the valley of the River Clyde, and the modern region reached further than the old kingdom by taking in Argyll.

Which town, rather than the cathedral city of Salisbury, is the county town of Wiltshire?

Trowbridge was once so full of woollen cloth mills that by 1820 it was being described as the Manchester of the West.

Which town, known for a breed of white duck, did Henry VIII declare the county town of Buckinghamshire?

Aylesbury had farmed its ducks since at least the 1690s, and Beatrix Potter's Jemima Puddle-Duck later revived interest in the breed.

Which county town of East Sussex is famous for the largest Bonfire Night celebrations in the country?

Lewes was the site of a major battle in 1264, and its 5 November marches controversially burn an effigy of the pope of the Gunpowder Plot era.

Which town on the River Strule replaced Dungannon as the county town of Tyrone in 1768?

Omagh serves the largest of Northern Ireland's six counties, and its name comes from Irish words meaning 'the virgin plain'.