Circles

While posting reference 1, it occurred to me that circular intrusions like that of the Wells Estate into Epsom Common were unusual. After a while, I remembered about something of the sort in one of the eastern states of the USA, but failed to find it on gmaps, his marking of state boundaries not being very conspicuous.

Bing did not get the idea at all, but Gemini was on the right track straight away, pointing me to the northern border of the state of Delaware - the political home of past president Biden, tax haven and registration home for many US corporations - and reference 2. Not quite a circle in the way of the Wells Estate, but certainly part of a circle, originally drawn on a map with a compass.

I had forgotten that it was mixed up with the Mason-Dixon line, an early example of a straight line drawn during the European expansion into more sparsely populated parts of the globe than their own. With such straight lines being a lot more common than circles. Squares and rectangles yes, circles not so much. It is, of course, much easier to tile a rectangle with allotments than a circle, and this, I imagine, has much to do with the rarity of circles. From where I associate to the tiling of the floor of a multi-storey office block. Circular or curved office blocks are, or at least were until recently, the exception rather than the rule.

But Gemini does turn up Sun City in Arizona, an attempt to tile a community bounded by north-south and east-west straight line segments with circles. But these important circles only rate a mention at reference 6.

He also turned up various circular forts, towns and villages, with the best example being the circular palace precinct of (eight century, Christian era) Baghdad, with the snap above lifted from reference 4 below. From which I have learned of the surrounding network of canals: very Amsterdam.

Then there was the collection of circular villages in central Germany, circular for defensive reasons in unsettled times. More or less visible in the snap above, centred on Rundlingsdorf Lübeln.

At this point I remembered about the intrusion of Newmarket into Cambridgeshire - with OS showing county boundaries about as clearly as gmaps show state boundaries.

But clear enough in the snap above, if not very circular - with Newmarket on its stalk left. Presumably the same sort of local peculiarity which gives us the Chessington finger sticking out from London into Surrey. Gemini knows all about this one too, although it did not appear in his original use and needed to be prompted.

So, for the moment, Delaware is the nearest I get to our Wells estate for geometrically imposed circularity on geography..

PS 1: I have learned from reference 4 that the word 'Baghdad' is of Persian origin, which presumably does not please the Iraqis of today.

PS 2: in the margins of this post, I came across the discipline of Mathematical Anthropology. Perhaps I could have made something of it during my time at university - at a place, as it happens, where both mathematics and anthropology were readily available. Perhaps I missed my vocation.

I have not yet got to the figure snapped above. But my understanding so far is that this is an edifice built on the knowledge that first Australian men favoured marriage with women who were ten or more years younger than they were. An inquiry which arises from reference 6.

A discipline which Bing suggests is alive, if not exactly thriving, turning up, inter alia, the online learning resource snapped above - which appears to confess to be being AI generated. The content seems fair enough - if a little banal - and not all the references still exist.

Copilot offers the snap above and more, suggesting to me that 'capstone' is something of a buzz-word in the training business. While Bing turns up lots of companies which have the word as part of their name - none of which look to be the fount of this kind of capstoning.

PS 3: Microsoft has just reminded me that this day last year I downloaded a copy of Holman Hunt painting 'Our English Coasts', featuring some strayed sheep. A reproduction of which hangs in our dining room and a picture which gets mentioned surprisingly often in these pages. See references 7 and 8. I think the original has been sent down to the Tate basement since then, that is to say since 2014.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/03/wellingtonia-136.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-Mile_Circle.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason%E2%80%93Dixon_line.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_City_of_Baghdad.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_City,_Arizona.

Reference 6: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/03/clans-and-marriages.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/boundaries.html.

Reference 8: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/04/an-older-trace.html.