Find The Place: a bloody waste of bloody time

One book put me off geography for ever, and it was called Find the Place. Each page had a map of the UK like this


Next to it, was the numbered list of places. What you were supposed to do was memorize the name and location, and then (with the list covered by the pupils) the teacher would go through the class by turn and you’d have to say the place name. “Find the Place”; clever, huh?

I’ve always been allergic to rote learning, and I never even tried to get these. I just remember trying to hide when that part of the lesson came round. I don’t think there was any theme to the places; they weren’t even the five main glove manufacturing towns in the Midlands, or anything. Just random dots.

To try your mad geog skillz, those dots are real places. Can you name them? Answers after the fold.

  1. Dolgellau
  2. Lune
  3. Knighton
  4. Eastbourne
  5. Padstow
  6. Cockermouth
  7. East Kilbride
  8. Newtown
  9. Cuckfield
  10. Fortrose

2 comments

  1. heh heh. i last used ‘Find the Place’ about 35 years ago. it wasn’t just for the UK, it was the whole world. i still look back and hate it. it was about locating little dots within a large irregular shape. if you didn’t already know exactly where these dots went then you couldn’t learn it unless you were good at positioning little dots within large irregular shapes. bugger all to do with geography. god how i hated that book.

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