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UK County Flags Quiz

The registered flags of England's counties plus Scotland and Wales on a flat map of the UK — from St Piran's cross and the white rose of Yorkshire to the white horse of Kent. London, the metropolitan counties, Bristol and Northern Ireland have no county flag of their own, so they stay on the map but out of the deck. Click a county or drag the flag onto it: three tries per flag, then the map shows the answer. Three names, three hints and three skips are free for the round.

Drag the flag onto a county, or click the county. Name shows the county the flag belongs to, Hint opens all three facts about it; after three misses, or Skip, the map places it for you. Scroll or pinch to zoom in.

All 39 counties and their county towns, the flags explained, more maps ↓

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UK County Flags Quiz

Drag the flags of England's counties, Scotland and Wales onto a flat map of the United Kingdom, three tries each. No labels.

County flags: a tradition barely twenty years old

Most flags on this map are younger than the people who fly them. England's counties had no flags of their own until the Flag Institute began keeping the UK Flag Registry, and county after county then chose one, usually by public competition or a radio-station vote: Devon's was picked in a poll in 2003, Yorkshire's and Lancashire's were registered in 2008, and Leicestershire's in 2021, the last English county to get one. Only a handful are genuinely old. St Piran's white cross on black has flown over Cornwall since at least the nineteenth century, the three seaxes of Essex and the six martlets of Sussex are arms attributed long ago to the Saxon kingdoms of the East and South Saxons, and the white horse rearing on Kent's red field is the emblem the county has used for centuries.

Two patterns account for most of the deck. One is the banner of arms, the council's shield spread over the whole cloth: Hertfordshire's stag on a gold shield among blue and white waves, Bedfordshire's red and gold quarters with a black stripe of three scallop shells taken from the arms of the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford, or Cheshire's three golden wheatsheaves and upright sword from the arms of the medieval earls of Chester. The other is the cross, which Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire all fly in their own colours. Scotland's Saltire and the Welsh dragon, recognised as the official flag of Wales only in 1959, complete the deck; Northern Ireland is drawn but takes no flag, because the Ulster Banner lost its official standing with the Northern Ireland parliament in 1973.

Roses, dragons and a fox: the animals and flowers to know

The Wars of the Roses live on in the north: Yorkshire's white rose sits on blue, Lancashire's red rose on gold. The Flag Institute would not register a red rose on white because the Scottish town of Montrose already held that design, which is why Lancashire's field is yellow. Hampshire puts a red-and-white Tudor rose on gold under a gold crown on red; Derbyshire a golden rose at the centre of a green cross on pale blue; Northamptonshire a rose on a gold cross on maroon. Two red dragons appear: the Welsh one walks across white over green, while Somerset's rears up on plain yellow with nothing under its feet.

Leicestershire's flag has a running red fox below a zigzag line and, above it, a white cinquefoil, the badge of the medieval earls of Leicester. Warwickshire's white bear grips a ragged staff on red, the badge of the Earls of Warwick, and is the flag most often dropped on Kent, whose white horse also stands on red: the horse rears, the bear stands upright holding a tree. Berkshire's stag stands under an oak on gold; Buckinghamshire's white swan wears a gold crown and chain on red and black; Wiltshire's golden great bustard, a bird reintroduced to Salisbury Plain after dying out in Britain, stands in a green roundel on green and white waves.

Nine crosses and how to tell them apart

For the crosses the colours are the whole answer. Cornwall is white on black. Devon is white on green, the cross edged in black for the moors. Dorset is white on gold, edged red. Gloucestershire's Severn Cross is blue for the river, edged in the cream of Cotswold stone, on green. Derbyshire's is green on light blue and carries its rose; Northamptonshire's is gold on maroon, edged black, with a rose too; Nottinghamshire's is red on green, edged white, with Robin Hood drawing his bow on a white shield in the middle; Lincolnshire's is red edged gold over green and blue quarters, with the fleur-de-lis of the city of Lincoln at the centre. Durham's is different in kind: St Cuthbert's cross, its arms flaring outwards, counterchanged in gold and blue on a field split the same way.

Rivers, crowns, chequers and ermine

Wavy bars for a river run through seven flags. Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire are both blue with waves, but Cambridgeshire has the three gold crowns of East Anglia around two light-blue waves for the Cam, while Hertfordshire has one gold shield and a stag. Worcestershire shows three black pears on a white shield over the blue Severn; Herefordshire a white Hereford bull's head on dark red over the Wye; Oxfordshire a red ox head on a white wavy band across dark blue, the ox and the ford together spelling the name, with an oak and a wheatsheaf in the corners. The Isle of Wight floats a white diamond, notched at the top for the Medina, over blue and white waves.

Crowns mark two more. Suffolk's is the crown of St Edmund, the East Anglian king the Danes shot with arrows, pierced by two of them on blue; Cumbria's gold crown sits above green and gold zigzags on dark blue. Norfolk answers with a white band of black ermine spots across gold and black, and Shropshire adds three gold leopards' faces, the loggerheads, over blue and gold scattered with the same spots. Two patterned flags close the list: Surrey's blue and gold chequers of the de Warenne earls, and Northumberland's interlocking red and gold bars, traced to the banner of purple and gold that Bede describes over the tomb of King Oswald. Rutland, the smallest county, is green with a gold horseshoe among acorns, recalling the horseshoes that peers visiting Oakham for the first time still give to the lord of the manor.

All 39 counties and their county towns

39 counties are on this map, listed in alphabetical order with their county towns — the same facts the Hint button draws on. Greater London, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Tyne and Wear, West Midlands, Bristol and Northern Ireland are drawn too but take no flag.

  1. BedfordshireBedford
  2. BerkshireReading
  3. Bristol
  4. BuckinghamshireAylesbury
  5. CambridgeshireCambridge
  6. CheshireChester
  7. CornwallTruro
  8. County DurhamDurham
  9. CumbriaCarlisle
  10. DerbyshireMatlock
  11. DevonExeter
  12. DorsetDorchester
  13. EssexChelmsford
  14. GloucestershireGloucester
  15. Greater London
  16. Greater Manchester
  17. HampshireWinchester
  18. HerefordshireHereford
  19. HertfordshireHertford
  20. Isle of WightNewport
  21. KentMaidstone
  22. LancashireLancaster
  23. LeicestershireLeicester
  24. LincolnshireLincoln
  25. Merseyside
  26. NorfolkNorwich
  27. NorthamptonshireNorthampton
  28. Northern Ireland
  29. NorthumberlandMorpeth
  30. NottinghamshireNottingham
  31. OxfordshireOxford
  32. RutlandOakham
  33. ScotlandEdinburgh
  34. ShropshireShrewsbury
  35. SomersetTaunton
  36. StaffordshireStafford
  37. SuffolkIpswich
  38. SurreyGuildford
  39. SussexLewes and Chichester
  40. Tyne and Wear
  41. WalesCardiff
  42. WarwickshireWarwick
  43. West Midlands
  44. WiltshireTrowbridge
  45. WorcestershireWorcester
  46. YorkshireYork

Questions about these flags

Why are Yorkshire and Sussex single counties on this map?

Because each has one flag. The white rose flies over North, South and West Yorkshire and the East Riding alike, and East and West Sussex both use the six martlets; the deck cannot hold the same flag twice, so the map merges them into the historic county. Yorkshire Day on 1 August and Sussex Day on 16 June are celebrated across the whole of each.

Why do London, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol have no flag?

Greater London and the metropolitan counties of Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Tyne and Wear and the West Midlands were created by the local-government reforms of 1965 and 1974, and no county flag has been registered for any of them; the registered flags belong to the historic counties around them. Bristol has been a county of its own since 1373, with civic arms but no county flag.

Who decides what a county flag looks like?

Nobody in government. The College of Arms grants coats of arms to councils, but a flag needs no grant: the Flag Institute, a charity, keeps the UK Flag Registry and records a design once a county has settled on it, usually through a public vote, or once a traditional flag such as Cornwall's has been in use for years. That is why so many were chosen in radio-station competitions.

More maps

Other maps: US states, Australian states, Ukrainian oblasts, French regions, Spanish regions, Italian regions, Japanese prefectures, Brazilian states, Polish voivodeships, German states, Dutch provinces, Swedish counties, Canadian provinces, Mexican states, Argentine provinces, Swiss cantons. All 235 flags of the world with their capitals: Flags of the world · all modes.