Just been playing with the new geotagging feature in Flickr. It’s good fun, but the poor quality of the maps really let it down. It’s impossible to accurately pinpoint where anything actually is, particularly since roads are most straight lines and railways often wander out into the sea.

Place names are pretty bad aswell: Burntisland is named correctly, but it is next to a non-existant town called Birntisland! Kirkcaldy isn’t named at all, and Dunkeld and Birnam have merged to become Dunkeld-Birnam. It’s just as well this tool exists then!

Update: I’ve found Kirkcaldy on Yahoo!’s map — in completely the wrong place.

Today my friend and I went on a walk from my house along the coast to Aberdour, which is about ten miles. To kind of give it perspective for those who don’t know Fife, here is a map, although we did not take that route (because, as I said, we went along the coast).

One interesting aspect of the walk was the fact the journey to Kinghorn, which once felt like a mammoth walk, seemed to go by really quickly; I barely noticed it.

We hit a problem between Kinghorn and Burntisland though. We attempted to reach Burntisland via Pettycur Bay, where we ended up in quite a nasty hailstorm (the weather had previously been sunny with just a few spots of rain). There we found what had appeared to be an abandoned rucksack, and a tent closer to the tide in the distance. I found it so strange just lying there in the middle of the beach that I took a photograph of it.

Then I turned round and there was somebody sitting there all along. Doh. He must have thought that I was well weird.

Anyway, we carried on until the beach just sort of stopped, and there was nothing between the Firth of Forth and Burntisland but a sea wall. We couldn’t find any way of getting further inland, so we had to walk all the way back to Kinghorn. Not a very successful period then.

We then sped on to reach Aberdour, taking just a couple of breaks. All-in-all we spent about three hours walking. I like doing that sort of thing. It really feels like you’ve achieved something. The thing is, though, it leaves me down on energy for the rest of the day…

(More photos from today are on Flickr.)

Google Earth is pretty cool.

But I have one question.

Why does Edinburgh suddenly become a greeny-purpley mass of ugliness past Murrayfield?

It looks like mince salad. Kirkcaldy also looks like this.

When you zoom out, it looks like just about the whole of the UK (and no doubt much of the world) is like this, save for a few squares here and there which go into more detail. One of these squares almost entirely covers the Firth of Forth, and a bit of a town called Gullane, which I have never heard of.

Mind you, it might be a mis-spelling. All of a sudden there is a town near me called Birntisland.

Update: Cross-posted at Broken Doll.