Thanks for your comments Aletheia, and particularly for all those
links to historic BoundaryPoint threads and other material. In
truth, I'm only now browsing some of the old messages here for the
first time, so I wasn't aware of the earlier discussions you may
have had here on points that feature in hidden europe. I can shed
some light on the alleged English quadripoint. As I said in the
article (which I wrote some months back, and which only now appears
in the magazine), it is probably a quadripoint, but could
conceivably be two very close tripoints I guessed if I'd been in
England and had access to some very large scale mapping, I might
have bothered to check, but being here in Berlin, I didn't check
and admit that in the article. It certainly has a degree of local
currency: folk evidently know about it (but they are probably
unaware of the existence of the tripointing community; in fairness,
I'd never come across tripointing until a few months back). I heard
that on the very day that Rutland was reconstituted as an English
county, 1 April 1997, a group from Oakham in Rutland visited all the
restored county's tripoints and recorded the point of convergence
with the ceremonial counties of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and
Northamptonshire as being a `four corner point.' In recent years, I
know that some Cambridge uni students and young academics have
regularly drunk their way round the boundaries of Cambridgeshire,
and once again the alleged quadripoint features.

The point is at OS grid reference TF020057. I attach a couple more
quotes from the feature which appears in the September 2006 issue of
hidden europe.

"If the cartographers can confirm that four English counties really
do converge at Ordnance Survey grid reference TF020057, there's a
real estate killing to be made in that field, and in a few years the
punters will be queuing to pay to experience what it feels like to
balance on all fours, supported by a limb positioned in each of four
different counties.

This balancing act is exactly what travellers on US Highway 160 do,
when they stop at the Four Corners Monument on an otherwise empty
desert road where the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New
Mexico meet. On the whole, Four Corners has the edge over its
English rival. True, you have to pay a three dollar fee to engage in
the simple acrobatics that will have you in four states at once, but
the air is clean and the views are pleasant. A bit of marshy
undergrowth below an embankment on England's Great North Road just
doesn't have the same appeal."

The article pays tribute to tripointers' evident abilities to sweet-
talk border guards into allowing them to go places where mere
mortals would never normally venture. What else? Well, a bit on the
Dreländereck Restaurant in Basel, and quite a lot on historic
tripoints that are no more. At a national level: Italy, Yugoslavia
and the Free State of Fiume, or subnationally, the erstwhile
Middlesex / Kent / Surrey tripoint in the Thames east of London.

Of course, we'd be delighted if anyone here at Boundary Point wanted
to buy a copy of the mag. It is a mere 7 a snip, dare I say and
there are bundled sets of back issues. We have something on
international borders in every issue of hidden europe. Hope this is
of interest. The website is at www.hiddeneurope.co.uk.
Nicky

--- In BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com, aletheia kallos
<aletheiak@...> wrote:

>
> welcome nicky & thanx for all the great news
> tho i got only as far as this tantalizing teaser page
> http://www.hiddeneurope.co.uk/article_info.php?articles_id=244
> so please do follow up as soon as possible with the
> balance of the report if you can
> or with as much as you can if you cant
>
> in the meantime these excerpts from our recent ongoing
> & perhaps even simultaneous quest for your great
> english quadripoint may interest you as well as
> explain my excitement over seeing it evidently
> referred to in your article
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BoundaryPoint/message/19709
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BoundaryPoint/message/19710
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BoundaryPoint/message/19712
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BoundaryPoint/message/19714
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BoundaryPoint/message/19716
>
> indeed your article fairly promises to be an answer to
> our calls for help
>
>
> also
> about your above title
> the following much older highlight from
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BoundaryPoint/message/1715
> A very nice site about the old tp atderu:
> http://www.zollgeschichte.de/monatskarten/11_98.htm
> To continue: click on Dreikaiserreichsecke. Lots of
> old postcards.
>
> --- Nicky Gardner <nicky@...> wrote:
>
> > The September 2006 issue of hidden europe magazine
> > has an article on the
> > art of bagging tripoints. The tripoint and
> > quadripoint examples it
> > includes are possibly well worn examples, many
> > surely well-known to
> > members of this forum. But it does include a report
> > from the point,
> > southeast of Myslowice in southern Poland, where a
> > hundred years ago the
> > territories of three great empires met at a
> > tri-point. The
> > Dreikaiserreichs Ecke is nowadays a rather forlorn
> > spot, but there was a
> > time when visiting this tripoint was seen as a
> > curious excursion. There
> > are many late nineteenth century postcards of the
> > spot, many including
> > images of the Kaiser, the Tsar and the Austrian
> > Emperor. For those
> > interested, the hidden europe website is at
> > www.hiddeneurope.co.uk
> > <http://www.hiddeneurope.co.uk> . The magazine has
> > regularly carried
> > articles on aspects of life in any around European
> > borders.
> >
>
>
>
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