UK Counties

What counts as a county

Ask three British people what a county is and you'll get three answers: the historic counties of the shire era, the administrative ones that run the bins, or the ceremonial ones that have a Lord Lieutenant. This map uses the ceremonial definition under the Lieutenancies Act 1997, because it's the one that gives a single, stable list across the whole UK — England's 48 ceremonial counties, the 8 preserved counties of Wales, Scotland's 35 lieutenancy areas, and the six counties of Northern Ireland. That's 96 to collect, ninety-seven if you count the City of London, which at one square mile is too small to click here.

It's a list that rewards domestic travel. Most people living in Britain have unknowingly collected twenty or thirty counties without trying; the blanks tend to be the ones no motorway runs through — Rutland, Herefordshire, Powys, the far north of Scotland, Fermanagh. Seeing them laid out is the point: the map tells you where to point the car next bank holiday.

Collecting them

A few natural loops cover a lot of ground. The West Country run — Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall — is a summer classic. The Marches along the Welsh border pick up Shropshire, Herefordshire, and Gloucestershire with Powys and Gwent across the line. Scotland's lieutenancy areas are the hard part: thirty-five of them, including Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles, each its own ferry or flight. Click a county once for visited and again for want-to-go, and if you're also working on Irish counties or the 92 Club grounds, those maps sit alongside this one.

Why ceremonial counties

The administrative map of England has been redrawn so many times — 1974, 1996, and a rolling series of unitary-authority reorganizations since — that any list built on it is out of date within a few years. The ceremonial counties are the ones that have stayed still: they're the areas a Lord Lieutenant represents the Crown in, and they roughly match the counties people still say they're from. So Greater Manchester and Merseyside are counties here, Huntingdonshire and Westmorland aren't, and Bristol is its own county despite being a city. Scotland's lieutenancy areas follow the same logic north of the border, which is why you'll find Stirling and Falkirk together and Inverness as a county rather than a town.