British rivers, lochs and seas, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 7 learning regions, matching the rounds on the United Kingdom guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted. Shared rivers and seas appear in one learning group, even when they cross regional boundaries.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 23 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Thames

About 346 kilometers, the longest river that stays inside England the whole way. It is tidal for the last 100 kilometers, as far up as Teddington, which is why London is a port at all. The Thames Barrier downstream of the city closes against surge tides and has done so more than two hundred times since it opened in 1982.

Severn

At about 354 kilometers it is the longest river in Britain, rising on Plynlimon within a few kilometers of the source of the Wye and running the opposite way round. Its estuary has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world, and the flood tide pushes a wave several kilometers up the river — the Severn bore, which people surf.

Trent

About 298 kilometers, the third-longest in Britain, and one of very few English rivers that runs north. It joins the Ouse to make the Humber, and it has a tidal wave of its own like the Severn’s, called the aegir after the Norse god of the sea. The power stations along it once generated a quarter of England’s electricity.

Great Ouse

About 230 kilometers, and the largest of the several English rivers called Ouse, which is a name that simply meant water. It drains the Fens, and in the 1630s the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden cut two dead-straight channels across the marsh to hurry it to the sea. The drained peat has shrunk so far since that much of the land now lies below the rivers crossing it.

Tay

About 188 kilometers, and it carries more water than any other river in Britain — roughly as much as the Thames and the Severn put together — because it drains the wettest ground in the country. The first railway bridge across its firth collapsed in a gale in December 1879 with a train on it, killing everyone aboard.

Tweed

About 156 kilometers, and the border follows it for part of its length. Berwick at its mouth changed hands thirteen times between the two kingdoms and ended up in England, though its football club still plays in the Scottish league. The cloth is named after the river by accident: a London clerk in the 1820s misread the Scots word "tweel".

Wye

About 250 kilometers, which puts it among the longest rivers in the country, and the England–Wales border runs down a good deal of its lower valley. It rises within sight of the source of the Severn and takes the other road round. The ruins of Tintern Abbey stand on a bend near the bottom of it, which is what Wordsworth wrote the poem about.

Swale

The map draws this as one line under one name, and on the ground it is three rivers end to end: the Swale off the Dales joins the Ure, and a few kilometers later the Ure becomes the Ouse, which is what reaches the Humber. The Swale itself is reckoned the fastest-rising river in England — it can come up several meters in a day.

Loch Ness

Thirty-seven kilometers long, never more than 2.7 wide, and 227 meters deep, which is enough to hold more fresh water than every lake in England and Wales together. Peat washed off the hills makes it nearly black a few meters down. The modern story about what lives in it dates from a newspaper report in 1933.

Loch Lomond

At 71 square kilometers it is the largest lake by area in Great Britain. The Highland Boundary Fault runs straight across it, which is why the two halves look nothing alike: south of the line it is wide, shallow and full of wooded islands, and north of it the loch narrows into a deep trench between mountains.

Loch Awe

About 41 kilometers, which makes it the longest freshwater loch in Scotland — longer than Loch Ness, though it holds a fraction of the water. Inside the mountain above it is Cruachan, a pumped-storage power station in a hall large enough to stand the Tower of London in, which pumps water uphill at night and lets it fall when the grid needs it.

Loch Maree

About 20 kilometers long and the fourth largest freshwater loch in Scotland, with more than sixty islands in it. Several of them carry Caledonian pines that have never been cleared, and one, Isle Maree, holds a holy well, a burial ground and an oak trunk hammered full of coins by people making wishes. Both loch and island are named for a seventh-century monk, Máel Ruba.

Loch Lochy

Sixteen kilometers long and 162 meters deep, which is deeper than most of the North Sea. It is the third of the lochs strung along the Great Glen, and the Caledonian Canal joins it to the other two: a boat can sail from the Atlantic at Fort William to the North Sea at Inverness without ever going round the top of Scotland.

Loch Rannoch

Fifteen kilometers long, with the Black Wood of Rannoch along its southern shore — one of the last surviving pieces of the Caledonian pine forest that once covered much of the Highlands. West of the loch is Rannoch Moor, about 130 square kilometers of blanket bog so soft that the railway across it was floated on a raft of brushwood and ash.

Lough Neagh

About 390 square kilometers, the largest lake in the British Isles, and shallow enough to wade a long way out into. Five of the six counties of Northern Ireland touch it, it supplies something like 40% of the region’s drinking water, and the eel fishery on it is one of the largest in Europe and still worked with lines set by hand.

Lower Lough Erne

Lower means downstream rather than south, and the Erne runs north, so the lower lough is the upper one on the map — a thing worth knowing before guessing. Its islands hold some of the strangest carved stone in Ireland: the figures on White Island, and a two-faced idol on Boa Island that may be pre-Christian.

Upper Lough Erne

Upstream of the other, and so south of it, which is the opposite of what the names suggest on a map. It is less a lake than a flooded lowland: a maze of small islands, channels and drowned fields spreading over the border into County Cavan, so tangled that the water and the land are hard to tell apart from the ground.

North Sea

About 570,000 square kilometers and only 95 meters deep on average, because most of it was dry land until around 6,500 BC: Doggerland, walked over by people whose flint tools still come up in trawl nets. Oil and gas have been pumped out of it since the 1960s, and it now carries more offshore wind capacity than any sea in the world.

Irish Sea

About 100,000 square kilometers with the Isle of Man in the middle of it, which is a Crown dependency and not part of the United Kingdom at all. At the top it narrows to the North Channel, 21 kilometers across at the closest point between Scotland and Northern Ireland — on a clear day each is plainly visible from the other.

English Channel

About 560 kilometers long and 33 kilometers wide at the Strait of Dover, and the busiest shipping lane in the world with something like five hundred vessels a day through it. The Channel Tunnel runs 50 kilometers underneath, 38 of them under water, which is the longest undersea stretch of any tunnel anywhere.

Bristol Channel

The Severn’s estuary opening westward into the Atlantic, and the funnel shape is what gives it a tidal range of about 15 meters, the second largest in the world after the Bay of Fundy. On the morning of 30 January 1607 the water came a long way inland along both shores and killed perhaps two thousand people; what caused it is still argued over.

Inner Seas off the West Coast of Scotland

The clumsy name is the official one, because this water has no single name of its own: it is the Minch at the top, the Sea of the Hebrides in the middle and the Firth of Clyde at the bottom, and the hydrographers gave the whole of it one label rather than choose. The Corryvreckan whirlpool, one of the largest in the world, turns in the gap between Jura and Scarba.

Atlantic Ocean

What keeps this country habitable. Edinburgh sits at 56°N, the same latitude as Moscow and as northern Labrador, and it is warmer than either by something like 5°C in the annual mean because the North Atlantic Drift carries warm water up from the Gulf of Mexico and dumps its heat on the western approaches.

How this one works

The other maps of the United Kingdom

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