Charlie Connelly · 2004 · sea

Charlie Connelly grew up listening to the shipping forecast without knowing where any of the places were, so he spent a year visiting all thirty-one areas - landing in every one that has any land in it and sailing or flying over the rest. Submitted by a reader in two parts and merged here, with the areas the split had lost restored.

1. 1
   Greenwich

   Where the forecast comes from and where Connelly starts - a man who has listened to it all his life without knowing where any of the areas are, setting out to visit all thirty-one inside a year.

2. 2
   Haugesund

   Viking, and the Norwegian coast - the mainland port from which the Utsira ferry runs, and the furthest north-east the forecast reaches.

3. 3
   Utsira

   North and South Utsire, and an island of about two hundred people - the smallest municipality in Norway, and the only forecast area named after somewhere you can walk across in an afternoon.

4. 4
   Cromarty

   The Black Isle on the Moray Firth - a village of a few hundred lending its name to a stretch of the North Sea, and one of the names that is pure incantation to British listeners.

5. 5
   Arbroath

   Forth, and the Angus coast - smokies, a ruined abbey, and Connelly's method throughout: turn up in the town the area is named after and see what is actually there.

6. 6
   Whitby

   Tyne, and the Yorkshire coast where Dracula came ashore - and the crossing east from here goes straight over Dogger Bank, an area with no land in it at all.

7. 7
   Hanstholm

   Fisher, and the north Jutland coast - a Danish fishing port, and the first of the continental stops on a list most British listeners assume is entirely British.

8. 8
   Sylt

   German Bight, and a North Frisian island of dunes and thatched houses that Germans go to for the reasons the English go to Cornwall.

9. 9
   Heligoland

   The other German Bight stop - a red sandstone rock thirty miles out, British until 1890, traded to Germany for Zanzibar, and bombed flat twice in the twentieth century.

10. 10
    Cromer

    Humber, and the Norfolk coast - crabs, a pier, and the lifeboatman Henry Blogg, which Connelly treats with as much seriousness as the North Atlantic.

11. 11
    Sealand

    Thames, and the self-declared Principality of Sealand - a wartime anti-aircraft platform seven miles off Suffolk with its own passports, currency and royal family, and the only stop that is a country.

12. 12
    Dover

    Dover, the busiest shipping lane in the world and the shortest crossing - the area everybody has heard of and nobody thinks about.

13. 13
    Shanklin

    Wight, and a Victorian resort on the Isle of Wight - chines, a chairlift, and a seaside town quietly declining since the trains stopped bringing everybody.

14. 14
    Portland Bill

    Portland, a limestone tombolo with a lighthouse and a tide race that has killed a great many people - one of the genuinely dangerous places on a list of mostly gentle ones.

15. 15
    Plymouth

    Plymouth, and the last of the English areas - after which Connelly leaves the country properly for Biscay and the Iberian coast.

16. 16
    St-Jean-de-Luz

    Biscay from the French side - a Basque fishing and whaling port on a bay every British sailor is taught to fear, approached by a man who has just flown over it.

17. 17
    Bilbao

    Biscay from the Spanish side, and the second half of an area that takes in two countries - and the long train west along the top of the peninsula.

18. 18
    Fisterra

    FitzRoy, renamed in 2002 after the man who invented the forecast - the cape the Romans took for the end of the world, and the pivot of the whole journey.

19. 19
    Hugh Town

    Sole, and the Isles of Scilly - St Mary's, St Agnes, Tresco and Bryher, reached on the Scillonian across some of the roughest short water in Britain.

20. 20
    Lundy

    Lundy, three miles long in the Bristol Channel with puffins, a pub and about twenty-eight residents - the smallest place on the list to have an entire sea area named after it.

21. 21
    Cork

    Fastnet, named after the rock that transatlantic liners used as their last sight of Europe - and which gives its name to the race that killed fifteen people in 1979.

22. 22
    Cobh

    The deep-water harbour below Cork, and the Titanic's last port of call - where the emigrant ships loaded, and where the Lusitania's dead were buried in 1915.

23. 23
    Douglas

    Irish Sea, and the Isle of Man - a horse tram, a thousand-year-old parliament, an unprepared bicycle tour of the TT course, and sea shanties in a hotel bar with Tom Hardy while Scary Spice pulled the pints.

24. 24
    Kilrush

    Shannon, on the estuary in County Clare - the west of Ireland facing an ocean with nothing between it and America.

25. 25
    Rockall

    A granite rock twenty-five metres across and two hundred miles from anywhere, and its own forecast area - and the reason Connelly was hounded by the national press, who reported that he intended to invade it.

26. 26
    Malin Head

    Malin, the northernmost point of the island of Ireland - a weather station, a headland, and one of the names anybody who has fallen asleep to the forecast can recite.

27. 27
    Castlebay

    Hebrides, and Barra in the Outer Isles - a castle in the bay, and an airport where the runway is the beach and the timetable depends on the tide.

28. 28
    Eriskay

    The island next door, where the SS Politician went aground in 1941 with twenty-eight thousand cases of whisky aboard - which became Whisky Galore, and which the islanders will still discuss at length.

29. 29
    Fair Isle

    Fair Isle, halfway between Orkney and Shetland - about fifty people, a bird observatory, a knitting pattern known worldwide, and some of the worst weather in Britain.

30. 30
    Lerwick

    Shetland's capital and the jumping-off point north - further from Edinburgh than Edinburgh is from London, and closer to Bergen than to Aberdeen.

31. 31
    Torshavn

    Faeroes, and one of the smallest capitals in the world - grass roofs, near-permanent cloud, and an area whose forecasts are read out nightly to people who have never seen it.

32. 32
    Vestmannaeyjar

    South-east Iceland, and a town on Heimaey half buried by its own volcano in 1973 that dug itself back out - the eruption that put a third of the island under lava while the fishing fleet evacuated everybody.

33. 33
    Hofn

    The south-east Iceland coast under Vatnajokull, and the end of it - thirty-one sea areas in a year, from a platform off Suffolk to a glacier lagoon, and a forecast that will never sound the same again.