This is so ironic. There is already a movie (Rien a Declarer / Nothing to declare) whose main premise is a guy spending his nights slightly moving the border between France and Belgium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6MljTh0kws (This extract is French only unfortunately :( )

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piQPaxlZWu4 (With English subtitles)

But, as someone who grew up less than 100 meters from this border, I'm pretty sure this stuff actually happens all over.

A neighbor once moved the pegs marking our block a few meters so that he could move (and claim) the neutral strip. The most irritating thing, is that he more or less got away with it because he was old and persistent. In fact, he gradually built infrastructure on it, despite hundreds of complaints to the local council and authorities. In the end the council couldn't come up with a good way to settle the dispute, so they offered to auction the neutral strip and its contents between us to the highest bidder.

I cant' help but rejoice that europe's borders (at least within the eu) are a mere stone. Not too long ago moving that stone might have led to war, now it leads to jokes.

If you want to see a messed-up peaceful border situation, there is a Mohawk community straddling the U.S./Canadian border with the actual line going through NY State, Ontario, Quebec, Cornwall Island, and the St. Lawrence River. The convoluted rules inhabitants have to follow to see relatives, go to school, get medical care and conduct daily business are extreme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akwesasne

The interesting implication here is the stone seems to mark the 'official' border and the nobody but the farmer can move it back without engaging in some sort of bureaucratic process.

If it is in, presumably, French territory now, why can't some French resident roll it back?

This is funny.

Even funnier are the so-called line houses along the USA/Canada border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_house

> A local history enthusiast was walking in the forest when he noticed the stone marking the boundary between the two countries had moved 2.29m (7.5ft).

How do you even measure that effectively? Aren’t the stones more than hundreds of meters away from each other?

edit: for example, can I do that as well with minimal equipment (e.g. with just a phone)?

> Belgian farmer accidentally moves French border

So if the farmer takes the stone and tractors it to East Russia, did the farmer accomplish more than Napoleon?

I wish that one day all borders in the world were like this.

South Carolina and North Carolina didn't manage to get their border recorded accurately until a few years ago. After re-surveying, there were 1400 parcels impacted.

https://www.wistv.com/story/13784677/dispute-over-north-caro...

https://hutchenslawfirm.com/blog/creditors-rights/north-and-...

Sounds like it was on purpose, not an accident, since the stone marker of the border was always in his tractor's path.

There is such a stone marker in my parent's garden (their house is definitely fully in French teritory)!

To be fair they are living so close to the frontier that my cellphone picks up the Belgian cell network in their house...

My father related this story of a German farmer in the northwest of Germany, who it turned out, was Dutch. Apparently somebody incorrectly mapped the border line of 1648 after the 30 years war, and so this family had (barely) lived in the Netherlands ever since, without knowing it, despite considering themselves German citizens.

I don't remember how this was resolved. I guess it thankfully just doesn't matter that much anymore, these days.

Only goes to show how ridiculous is the idea of physical borders between countries.

We shall retaliate by symbolically pouring beer into the gutter and stepping on fried potato chips in front of the Belgian embassy.

(For the uninitiated https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/stabbing-oranges-an...)

In other news, Poland accidentally invaded Czech Republic: <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/poland-czech...>

Wow, as a US citizen looking at the France/Belgium border [0] I can’t imagine what it’d be like for a disagreement with your next door neighbor to become an international incident. I suppose it’s probably just no big deal.

[0] https://goo.gl/maps/cPbAY3DxQNhUy2SZ9

A character in Neal Stephenson's "Fall or Dodge in Hell" - exploits a hypothetical issue at the Belgium/French border to fence off his home and form a sovereign city state (enforced by armed guards, political influence and technology).

A few meters from my mother in law's house stood a small stone marker next to the forest path (hers was the last one in the village, and was enclosed by the forest itself). One side of the stone read "Brauschweig", the other "Hannover". It was easy to miss, being buried in the undergrowth.

A few years ago someone got the idea that it was of Important Historical Interest and so moved it further down the path. It's not clear whether this moved the "actual"* border since they didn't place it in the same orientation. Somehow the misorientation annoys me more than moving it.

* "actual" gets quotation marks as the denoted territories no longer exist, though the cities by those names do.

The border between Germany and France, between Rhineland-Palatinate, and the Moselle and Bas-Rhin departments is adjusted from time to time by a few meters, whenever the course of small border rivers has changed.

My family farm got a new neighbor, who noticed that he technically owns a sliver of land with the first 100 feet of our gravel driveway, nevermind that we've been using it for the past 50 years since our property was purchased. I don't think anyone had noticed before, as this goes way back before GIS systems and satellite photos of property boundaries. For decades there's been a fence in the logical place between the driveway and the neighboring property.

The legal system would probably side with us, but it's a pain.

It looks like the farmer's land spreads across the border. How is that possible? Or at the very least his land goes all the way to the border line. Either way, in today's age when the line can digitally recorded, why do we need the stone? Both countries know where the line goes through. Could they not just ignore that one stone and let the farmer do his work? I was hoping they would just ignore it, instead I see that he has to put it back, else face criminal charges too.

This made me wonder...are (most) of the (undisputed) borders of the world actually stored somewhere? Or are some stones and posts still the "official" borders?

Borders are shifting all the time based on how the water flows:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_border_r...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_river_borders_of_U.S._...

Serious question: why does anyone but the farmer care? A 2m move in the middle of a field hardly seems to make much of a difference to anyone else.

Surely grounds for a full scale invasion!

Reminds me of the dispute between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island#cite_ref-The_Post_...

Must be nice to have neighbours that aren't threatening to go to war if your borders change.

Texas says hold my beer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27038157

Texas stole land from New Mexico by setting the border wrong

What a charming story.

Now do Mt. Fuji.

Damn. Just leave the farmer alone.