It would be, rather, my terminus ad quem, whatever exactly that means. I determined that I would begin and end at its terminal points, and visit it from time to time en route when I conveniently could and when I remembered to do so, but I wouldn’t force myself to follow it religiously. But I could certainly use the Bryson Line as a kind of beacon, to guide my way. It would mean, if I took it literally, going through people’s houses and gardens, tramping across trackless fields, and fording rivers, which was clearly crazy and if I just tried to stay close to it, it would mean endlessly picking my way through suburban streets in places like Macclesfield and Wolverhampton, which didn’t sound terribly rewarding either. The bottom, even more interestingly, went straight through Bognor Regis.įor the briefest of periods, I considered the possibility of travelling through Britain along my newly discovered line (the Bryson Line, as I would like it now to become generally known, since I was the one who discovered it), but I could see almost at once that that wouldn’t be practical or even desirable. The longest straight line actually started at the top left-hand side of the map at a lonely Scottish promontory called Cape Wrath.

Laying a ruler across the page, I discovered to my surprise that the ruler tilted away from Land’s End and John o’Groats, like a deflected compass needle. I wanted to know what was the furthest you could travel in a straight line without crossing salt water. If you allow zigzags, then you could carom about the country in any pattern you wished and thus make the distance effectively infinite. But the real issue is that a journey from Land’s End to John o’Groats would require a series of zigzags. It is about 870 miles.”) For one thing, the northernmost outcrop of mainland is not John o’Groats but Dunnet Head, eight miles to the west, and at least six other nubbins of land along that same stretch of coastline are more northerly than John o’Groats. (What it said, for the record, is: “The longest distance on the mainland is from John o’Groats on the north coast of Scotland to Land’s End in the south-west corner of England. It is most assuredly not from Land’s End to John o’Groats, despite what my official study guide had said.

Apart from anything else I was curious to see what is the longest distance you can travel in Britain in a straight line. Later that afternoon, at home, I pulled out my ancient and falling-apart AA Complete Atlas of Britain (so old that it shows the M25 as a dotted aspiration) just to have a look. “That’s the second reference I have heard to Bognor Regis this week,” I said.

Road to little dribbling