This is a picture of Blackpool Tower taken through my binoculars on the beach at Conishead Priory near Ulverston on our trip to the Buddhists yesterday. Sorry it's a bit fuzzy - difficult conditions for photographing. By measuring a road atlas, I reckon that it is about 25 miles distant. Blackpool Tower is a bit like the Eiffel Tower. You can't see the wider base, which shows that some of it is below the horizon. Apparently the Greeks knew that the Earth was round because the first thing they saw of a ship was the top of the sail and then the rest appeared. So how widespread was the flat Earth belief in the Middle Ages?? Did sensible people really understand from evidence like this that the Earth was round? Wikipedia suggests that the horizon should only have been about 3 miles away, but we had good views to Heysham, which is 10 miles. I will have to look into those calculations too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon
