Stefan

Having chased a number of these to the source, they sort into four buckets and only the last is interesting.

Pure invention. No statute, no ordinance, no record of either. The claim traces back to a listicle citing another listicle citing a third, and the chain terminates without ever reaching a legal text. This is the largest category by a wide margin.

Repealed long ago. A real law once existed and was removed decades or centuries back. The list reports it in the present tense because "was repealed in 1912" makes a worse item.

Real but wildly misdescribed. A general ordinance about obstruction or public nuisance gets retold as a specific ban on one absurd act. The underlying rule is mundane; the retelling is not.

Real, obsolete and unrepealed. These do exist. Legal codes are large and nobody profits from tidying them, so genuinely archaic provisions can survive. They are also, almost always, unenforceable — superseded by later law, or by constitutional provisions that override them.

That last point is the one the lists never mention, and it is the whole story: a provision sitting in an old code is not the same as a rule anyone could be prosecuted under.

The missing section number is the fastest filter I know. Once you start looking for it you stop needing to check anything else.

Worth adding the asymmetry that drives the whole thing: verifying a proof is far more expensive than producing a claim.

A careful read of a substantial manuscript is weeks of expert time. Claims arrive constantly. Without triage the field would spend all of its attention on the incoming queue and none on research, so some filter is unavoidable — and a filter based on structural signals is a good deal better than one based on who the author is.

The short version is that the claim fails at both ends, and the careful wording is doing a lot of work.

The title end. The relevant Scottish heraldic authority has addressed this directly and its position is that ownership of a small plot of ground does not entitle anyone to any style or title. The word people are reaching for is a description historically associated with the owner of a substantial estate, not a legal title conferred by owning land, and certainly not by owning a token parcel.

The land end. This is the part that surprises people. For a plot that small, what is transferred is generally not registrable ownership in any meaningful sense. Registration systems have thresholds and requirements that a souvenir plot does not meet, so the buyer often does not end up on any register at all.

So the honest description of the product is a certificate and a novelty, sold with wording that gestures at a custom without ever quite claiming the thing the advertising implies.

One more benefit that rarely gets mentioned in the safety argument but drives a lot of the decisions: throughput at moderate traffic levels, and behaviour during power failures.

A roundabout keeps working when the electricity is out, needs no maintenance contract for signal equipment, and does not make anybody wait at a red light with no cross traffic at four in the morning.

Whether that outweighs the annoyance is a local judgement. But it means the choice is not being made purely on the injury figures, which is worth knowing when reading the official material.