I have a friend who is fascinated by enclaves and exclaves. But then he has invented his own language, learned Norwegian in order to translate into English, travels Europe in search of weird and wonderful beers (sorry, that was my fault. He once had the temerity to opine that all beers are weak, wet and taste the same! He’d never sampled Belgian abdij bier), exclusively drives Alfa Romeo’s and thinks that fruitcake is for the soul. He’s not your average Johnny. He’s as pale as death and as fat as a pencil with the wood shaved off! And he’s fascinated by exclaves. I too am aware of the existence of exclaves. I love maps and in poring over the art of the cartographer can point to quite a few, internationally. I just didn’t know that I needed to be fascinated by them. For the record, and hoping that this is correct, an enclave is a piece of somewhere else surrounded by a single other entity. Llivia is a piece of Spain entirely within France and so is an enclave. The 2018 world cup highlighted Kaliningrad, the little piece of Russia that is trapped between mighty Lithuania and Poland. This is an exclave. German Büsinger is in Switzerland as is Campione d’Italia – both enclaves. One I didn’t know about, and was only too happy to be enlightened of, is Baarle-Hertog. It is a collection of 16 Belgian enclaves and exclaves scattered around a small area of the Netherlands. And some of those bits contain bits of the Netherlands. The boundaries go through shops and cafes. There are lines on the roads and pavements. Some buildings have one door in Belgium and another in the Netherlands. It is crazy – and a slightly weird tourist attraction. Get yourself a map and have fun deciding which ones are enclaves and which are exclaves.
Here in the UK our historical county system was full of such detachees. Acquire some historical maps and you’ll find them all over the place. Sadly they have all been tidied up, presumably in the name of expediency and efficiency. A notable case was the County of Cromartyshire but rarely known independently of Ross-shire. That’s because it consisted entirely of enclaves and exclaves – 24 of them dotted around within Ross-shire. I suppose that this means that, on a technicality, they are not [xn]claves at all, there being no ‘parent land’; unless you wish to designate the area immediately surrounding the town of Cromarty as the parent. It was more of a distributed county. Anyway, the combined county was known as Ross and Cromarty. It was likely easier to administer as such and that realisation was legislated in the Local Government Act of 1889. Perthshire too had an exclave. It was down on the banks of the River Forth, between Fife and Clackmannanshire. And a fascinating place it is too. Culross (pronounced kuross) is now an NTS-owned village with a strong industrial past.
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