Britain's most extreme villages

Perched on Axe Edge Moor in the Peak District, and once a haunt of counterfeiters, whose fake coins gave us the phrase "flash money."

The Ordnance Survey's official most landlocked spot in Great Britain, equidistant from the Wash, the Dee and the Severn. As far from salt water as an island nation allows.

Ten miles south of Helston, on the peninsula from which the Spanish Armada was first sighted in 1588.

At the head of Borrowdale, where the fells funnel Atlantic rain onto a handful of farms. It also holds a Met Office record for rainfall in a single day.

On the mainland, yet cut off from the national road network. You reach it by a seven-mile ferry from Mallaig or an eighteen-mile hike over the mountains. Its pub is the remotest on the British mainland.

A former lead and gold mining village in the Lowther Hills. The gold panned here went into the Scottish Crown. Also one of the coldest inhabited spots in the country.

It took the Welsh title from Bwlchgwyn near Wrexham after an Ordnance Survey check in 2015. The former holders still grumble.

The lowest land in Great Britain. After the draining of Whittlesey Mere in 1852 the peat sank, leaving an iron post that once stood flush with the ground now standing metres proud.

Home to Britain's most northerly church, on the island of Unst. The nearby croft cluster of Skaw is the northernmost settlement of all, at the end of the UK's most northerly road.

One of the smallest permanently inhabited islands of the Inner Hebrides. Car-free, reached by a small ferry across a 200-metre channel, and host of the annual World Stone Skimming Championship in a flooded slate quarry.

The hotly contested titles

Some superlatives have no settled answer, because "village" itself has no official definition. Here are the honest contests.

Whitwell, in England's smallest county, had a recorded population of 41 and once "twinned" itself with Paris by pub vote. Fordwich in Kent is smaller still by council status, but it is legally a town, not a village. Take your pick of definition.

A dig at Blick Mead near Amesbury dates occupation to around 8820 BC and is the current front-runner. Thatcham held the earlier Guinness listing on Mesolithic evidence from around 7700 BC. Whether either counts as "continuous" is exactly what's disputed.

Long billed as the driest place in Britain at around 507 mm of rain a year, though the claim is press-sourced rather than from an official long-term weather station. The Met Office's own driest station is nearby Shoeburyness, which is arguably a town.