Interesting Maps

If I'm correct, when the wall was built, any lines that crossed into the Soviet-controlled zone were either stopped at the line or where the railway crossed twice, the trains didn't stop in the Soviet-controlled zone.

you had to pass through a border checkpoint.

It's quite possible it would have been by tunnel (well) under Glasnevin Cemetery.

They don't - only sovereign states have EEZs. I think that map shows the EEZs that the various territories of the UK would have, if they were sovereign states and the UNCLOS rules and practices for determining EEZs were applied.

As 40% of modern Poland was in Germany until 1945 you have to wonder a bit about the provenance of those names, especially in the West. And of course other places like Lwów are lost to Poland.

Density of recorded archaeological monuments in Ireland

Burnt mounds, or fulachtaí fiadh locations in Ireland.

Burnt mounds, or fulachtaí fiadh as they are known in Ireland, are probably the most common prehistoric site type in Ireland and Britain. Typically Middle–Late Bronze Age in age (although both earlier and later examples are known), they are artefact-poor and rarely associated with settlements. The function of these sites has been much debated with the most commonly cited uses being for cooking, as steam baths or saunas, for brewing, tanning, or textile processing. A number of major infrastructural development schemes in Ireland in the years 2002–2007 revealed remarkable numbers of these mounds often associated with wood-lined troughs, many of which were extremely well-preserved. This afforded an opportunity to investigate them as landscape features using environmental techniques – specifically plant macrofossils and charcoal, pollen, beetles, and multi-element analyses. This paper summarises the results from eight sites from Ireland and compares them with burnt mound sites in Great Britain. The fulachtaí fiadh which are generally in clusters, are all groundwater-fed by springs, along floodplains and at the bases of slopes. The sites are associated with the clearance of wet woodland for fuel; most had evidence of nearby agriculture and all revealed low levels of grazing. Multi-element analysis at two sites revealed elevated heavy metal concentrations suggesting that off-site soil, ash or urine had been used in the trough. Overall the evidence suggests that the most likely function for these sites is textile production involving both cleaning and/or dyeing of wool and/or natural plant fibres and as a functionally related activity to hide cleaning and tanning. Whilst further research is clearly needed to confirm if fulachtaí fiadh are part of the ‘textile revolution’ we should also recognise their important role in the rapid deforestation of the wetter parts of primary woodland and the expansion of agriculture into marginal areas during the Irish and British Bronze Ages.

Self reported means that there's going to be people who think "cervaza por favour" means they speak Spanish, and likely Germans with near fluent English who don't list themselves as speaking English

AN honours in the Leaving is a bit more than that, although well short of fluency and a lot of people do not make use of their language afterwards.

Went to Romania back in 1999 for the eclipse. Was with a mate from UK who is half-Italian, and he basically got away with mumbling in Italian and people understood him.