British media has been reporting a rash of rude and crude sightings around the country both on Google Maps and the Microsoft equivalent, Virtual Earth.

In the most recent discovery, a prank by two students from a school near Southampton in the south of the country has just come to light.

According to reports, the two unnamed year 11 students from the all-male Bellemoor School used weed killer to etch an image of a six metre-long phallus in the grass as an end-of-term joke.

Their handy work appears on Virtual Earth which, like Google Maps, uses a combination of satellite and aerial imagery to allow users to zoom down on landmarks from high up...

There's also been a spate of rude word sightings. Earlier last month, Google Maps spotters came across 20 metre-high letters in a field just north of Edinburgh in Scotland spelling POO - possibly qualifying it as being the world's first crap circle.

Other sightings include the words ARSE written in a field near Rotherham and, in another field near Barnsley, the words EDDIE and F---K (without the dashes) have been spelt out using hay bales.