“It is alleged, that here at ‘The Turf’, Bill Clinton, whilst studying at the University during the sixties ‘did not inhale’ when smoking certain substances….”. Or so claims the 42nd potus and a blackboard outside one of Oxford’s hostelries. Whilst ‘The Bach’ in Caernarfon purports to be the smallest bar in Wales, a similar assertion for England is made by ‘The Nutshell’ in Bury St. Edmunds, where it’s “happy to accept bus parties of two or fewer”. (Credit for their usage of ‘fewer’ in place of the once-ubiquitous supermarkets’ notice: ten items or ‘less’ at the checkout aisle).

Wandering as we travel, it becomes an intriguing interest, spotting these claims to fame, these desires for uniqueness. The ease with which I keep finding them suggests either I might have acquired an obscure ability, an embarrassing problematic condition, or more likely, they are simply everywhere.

‘Manawatū: the only river in the world to flow east to west through a mountain range’. I was left with the image of a stroppy troglodytic watercourse having a tantrum and deciding to be perverse by clambering its own way up, over and under rather than flowing along the more accommodating grain of the Ruahine ranges. This claim was spotted over two decades ago but not photo’-recorded; it being part of that amorphous late analogue era. Whenst e-mails were composed on a Kindle, whilst a film was still posted home for processing; what a quaint age that was. Still, that FameClaim has remained in my memory, in part because the rest of that day was spent concocting ever more spurious accolades: “two lane highway travelling in a northerly direction with a shrub-free meridian greater than 7 but less than 11 metres”. “The world’s first grass sward with a cow flop density of 3/m2… to see the sun rise”. Fanciful; mostly unverifiable. Then realising that others could out-compete my feeble imaginations: ‘Cabo Mondego was awarded a “golden spike” in recognition of the sediments, fossils and micro fossils from the Bajocian era that are found here, making it the only site in the world to serve as a global reference for the Middle Jurassic period’. I’ve spotted other equally long and wordy claims; most seem to come out of geological institutions. Possibly in honour of James Hutton, purported ‘father of Geology’ who could compose obscure and convoluted one-hundred word sentences when ten would have been equally eloquent.

Whilst the phrasing is important, a single word can be vital. ‘The longest ‘continuous’ herbaceous border in the world’, once claimed for the castle’s garden in Direton. Many might be longer, but they were not ‘continuous’. (Kew Gardens have subsequently established a longer and, more importantly, continuous, border). Now they could just have added the inexorable ‘Once’ as a prefix, just as others have done. ‘Once’ the longest railway in the world’, an assertion dating to the early British Industrial Revolution, ergo competition wasn’t fierce, it being previous to virtually every other railway in the world. The Hay Tramway was a horse-drawn wooden-railed network and the missing link between the dying canals and emergent steam. Today it’s a section on the Taff Trail.

Defunct and extant railway infrastructure does lend itself to these superlatives. The longest tunnel without an air shaft: Combe Down; Scotland’s longest heritage mural: Colinton Tunnel; ‘the only aqueduct to have its own station’: Avoncliff. The latter is an intriguing one, being constructed towards the end of the golden age of canal expansion. For the developers and financiers to incorporate two apparently competing haulage methods might suggest indecision, a hedging of bets, or enlightened prescience for a world two centuries hence. I get to watch a two-carriage Sprinter rattling along and into the station as a narrowboat glides across the aqueduct, over the river and the railway line. The coal, ore and aggregate that would once have been hauled along these still waters or iron rails, now grumble along the A36.

Then there’s the awarding authorities. From bread, beer and the deep fried batter trades, through the myriad arms of construction to the beauty, hospitality and touristic industries, there’s over four thousand opportunities to collect a FameClaim in the UK each year. Assertions to quality, age or authenticity. A gong for everyone. An ever-revolving hoard of annual award ceremonies, black tie dinners with ‘grip ‘n grin’ photos of gaudy gold-embossed certificates to hang on a wall. Only they’re too ubiquitous to make it a viable photo’ project and as with any over-supply, the economics of the market prevails, FameClaims become ubiquitous, devalued, and so rendered cheap.

Time to riddle the dross, create tighter parameters and curate a more refined collection. Enter the Geographical extremists.

Generally more easily verifiable, in the main arriving in the singular. There can be only one ‘Britain’s most northerly bus shelter’, ‘Scotland’s most southerly grocery store’, ‘the world’s most austral road-end’. We’ve chanced on two and deliberately hunted the third. That shelter could enhance its claim with the additional contention: ‘with a flowering cactus’, the last with the problematic citation that the route ‘ends in water’. One stands on Unst, the other outside Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, a ‘journey’s end’ that for us was but a way-station on a journey.

Some FameClaims (var. extremis), can be a bit more parochial, this from one local authority: ‘the District Council welcomes you to Tarbat Ness, the most easterly extreme of Ross and Cromarty’. Whilst others feel the need to augment their geographical extremism with a bit of added value. Frankie’s, not content with its ‘most northerly….’ distinction then adds ‘The National Fish & Chip Shop Awards’ 2015; to their bragging wall. Where that inevitable half-gallon jar of pickles graces the servery, usually it’s onions or eggs bobbing around in a marinade, a product that is first purchased when any chippie first opens and then never to be broached. Only in this instance it’s soused mussels that adorn the counter, where it asks you to look up, gaze out the window, out to sea, to see where its contents are sourced. ‘Shetland Fresh’, but possibly only in the sense of minimalist food miles.

Plotting this nation’s four mainland cardinal points is easy, they’re all punctuated with the exclamation mark of lighthouses. What’s not so easy is agreeing the nation’s precise centre* point.

Do you measure from the mainland shoreline, do you include the inhabited islands, do you enclose the strategically yet utterly insignificant lump of guano-encrusted stone that is Rockall in your calculations? Or do you calculate the nation’s ‘mathematical centre of gravity’. I’m grateful to that august body, The Ordnance Survey, for explaining this concept and then doing the maths. Basically, take Scotland, place it on a spurtle and find its balancing point. It must have been a quiet day in the office. Still the empiricist or ludditical nerd in me wonders if ‘they’ took into consideration the differing volumetric weights of Lewisian gneiss as against the blowaway sands of the Morayshire coast, or that islet of Rockall sitting 230 miles west of North Uist must act as an elongated destabilising leaver. The answer that the OS proposed to this mathematical gravitational question is either around Loch Garry or a hillside in the vicinity of Schiehallion. As for the other geographical centres, they could be in Glentruim or a multiplicity of other possibilities.*** The former is marked by a repositioned six-tonne glacial erratic, and an underwhelming chiselled cross in a drystane wall that has taken several visits to find. An earlier iteration was stolen.

Yet another more questionable centre contender is a homophone located in the central belt. The motorway services area at Harthill that now styles itself The Heart of Scotland, where a red deer stag meets a muscular blood pump at the watershed on the M8.

So possibly this monologue’s moral conclusion should be that FameClaims are everywhere simply because ‘everywhere’ is unique. Set enough qualifying criteria and every everywhere can qualify. For example, our flat in Haddington could easily acquire its own FameClaim: ‘Scotland’s only mid-floor, mid Georgian property, located at 292°NNW to Scotland’s oldest continuously chiming curfew bell’.

Now having accidentally found two of the home nation’s smallest alcoholic-beverage-selling venues, I decide to delve into brainrot.com to hunt out Scotland’s own possible FameClaim contender. Almost inevitably it’s called The Wee Pub, it’s on the Grassmarket, Edinburgh and I’ve walked past it numerous times and not noticed it. Maybe my embarrassing affliction is in remission**.

PostScript*: Precise centre; not dead centre, which of course is the Glasgow Necropolis. @

PostScript**: I’m perusing our local library’s shelves and can over hear the old-boys on the Scrabble board. They’re counting their scores…. one has three ‘A’ tiles left over, the other has a couple of ‘E’s and a ‘W’, to which his friend intimates: “incontinence’ , it’s a wee Scottish problem”.

PostScript***: As per ‘@undertheradar’, I garnered the following…(note that Shetland has been place in it’s designated locale, astride the 60°N parallel and not parcelled up in a box only to be rammed into the wedge just outside the Cromarty Firth, like a misdirected on-line parcel).
-centroid based on a minimum bounding circle… in the sea near Buckie.
-centroid based on a bounding rectangle… to the nor’west of Dingwall, Ross-shire.
-centroid based on an orientated bounding box…nr. Arradoul, Banffshire.
-centroid based on a convex hull… Munlochy, Easter Ross.
-centroid based on the landmass… Trinafour, Perthshire.
-furthest point from mainland coast… Just outside Braemar.