The study of British and Irish roads - their construction, numbering, history, mapping, past and future official roads proposals and general roads musings.
There is a separate forum for Street Furniture (traffic lights, street lights, road signs etc).
Registered users get access to other forums including discussions about other forms of transport, driving, fantasy roads and wishlists, and roads quizzes.
A road was featured on Countryfile (BBC1) yesterday. The A719 in Ayrshire apparently has an optical illusion at Croy Brae, whereby the car appears to be rolling uphill
They interviewed a chap who had driven 400 miles from Northampton, just to experience it. C'mon own up, it was one of you wasn't it.
Interesting though, I'd never heard of it until then. Now I want to go there myself.
Presumably, our Ayrshire contingent know it well.
SteveA30 wrote:A road was featured on Countryfile (BBC1) yesterday. The A719 in Ayrshire apparently has an optical illusion at Croy Brae, whereby the car appears to be rolling uphill
They interviewed a chap who had driven 400 miles from Northampton, just to experience it. C'mon own up, it was one of you wasn't it.
Interesting though, I'd never heard of it until then. Now I want to go there myself.
Presumably, our Ayrshire contingent know it well.
AKA Electric Brae... its pretty cool.. even has warning signs to beware of cars stopping to try it out!!
How spooky, I linked the A roads page on wikipedia to the Electric Brae article yesterday.... Didn't know there was anything about it on the telly though...
Yeah the electric brae, its not as good as it was due to the surface being resurfaced.
Is a good illusion surprised never caused accidents since heading south you hit it when you come outta a corner.
They added a layby to accomdate people stoping on it, i rememeber on a school trip to Culzean Castle they stoped the bus and the teacher poured a bottle of water "up the hill"
Nice to see a vid of it but doesent really do it justice looks a lot better in real life, best thing to do is as my teacher did get some type of fluid and pour it.
Surely this contravenes the laws of physics/gravity.
C, E flat and G go into a bar. The barman says "sorry, we don't serve minors". So E flat walks off, leaving C and G to share an open fifth between them.
Never argue with an idiot. They will bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
I thought we had discussed something like this in the past!
The most famous one is the Magic Hill in the US. But similar optical illusions occur near Niton on the IOW and near Aston Clinton in Bucks.
Steven will no doubt mention if I don't the Crooked House pub near Dudley, where a ball will roll visibly uphill [in fact, the pub leans and the uphill window frame is going downhill at a greater gradient].
Rodborough Common near Stroud has a related effect, where you climb what appears to be a short slope to a summit- but the summit never arrives and you walk for a mile before getting there. Like the Electric Brae, Niton and Aston Clinton, the illusion is caused by the position of the horizon in relation to where you are- or something like that
worcsfan wrote:I thought we had discussed something like this in the past!
About a week ago actually - I posted it as a reply to a question in the roads quizes here
It really does work - when I went there many moons ago I approached from "the bottom", changed down acog and realised that going down was going up was in fact going down.
We did all the tourist stuff like pouring water on the road and watching it go uphill, letting the car drift uphill and so on.
Highly recommended for a day out if you're in the area.
On a related matter, there are many fells with relatively flat featureless summits, especially in the Pennines. It can be very frustrating when trying to get to the highest point, as often no matter where you stand there's always somewhere that looks higher.