The measurement is “counties” away from the coast. Not miles nor km.

I realise now its literally in the title but for some reason the terminology did not compute and i just kept reading it as miles.

I thought there was something seriously off with this map or that it was a good example of the mercator distortion and had started to compare distances between cities.

Interestingly enough it wan ai (claude) that pointed this out from just the raw pic.

“The methodology of measuring by county units rather than strict distance creates an interesting visualization ”