I talked to Peta Credlin on News24 about the expression ‘a country mile.’
A viewer had asked if a country mile was really longer than a city mile.
A good question.
The term 'country mile' goes back to at least 1661.
And it seems that a mile in the countryside was once regarded as being longer than a standard mile.
What is unclear from my research is whether there were, in fact, two different measurements or it was just a case of the travelling a mile in the countryside always felt longer.
However, my best guess is that there was once a real difference, back before measurements were standardized.
A reader (Mark) has drawn my attention to a book called About the Size of It by Warwick Cairns which explains where our measures of weights, sizes and distances originally came from.
It says that originally a mile was one thousand paces, using left-right-left, as one pace. The distance was thus one thousand five foot lengths or 5,000 feet per mile.
This is what is now called a Roman mile that applied back in the days of the Roman empire.
But that required lots of counting.
Who wants to do that?
Much easier was the farmer’s method of counting the number of fields you walked past.
Each field (in those days) was a furlong—a furlong being how far a plough team could plough before needing a rest and turning around.
(An acre was originally a day’s worth of ploughing).
And for farmers, eight furlongs (that is, eight fields) made a mile.
By the Middle Ages the furlong had been standardised to 220 yards.
So the mile of eight furlongs became the standard English Statute Mile at 5,280 feet.
Or 56 paces or 280 feet or about 6% longer, than the 5,000 feet mile of a Roman mile—making a ‘country mile’ longer than an urban mile.
Fascinating!
And my thanks for Mark for all this information.
My latest column (about the decline of the Liberal Party) is now available at News24 online. Here's the link: Next month marks 11 years since the Liberal Party began its slow decline into electoral irrelevance | News24
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