In Adamawa state, ringed by the mountainous hideouts used by Boko Haram, schools, mosques, homes and churches like Kwairanga's have become shelters for the displaced.
The suffragette and novelist Rebecca West admired the "pretty young girls" but also noted that they were contained on a site "ringed with barbed war entanglements and patrolled by sentries".
Coming from the south, the first thing you notice about Broken Hill is the mountains of black mullock and the industrial machinery rising above them, rows of miners' cottages and equipment yards, ringed by cyclone fences.
By four in the afternoon the city, ringed by its Andean peaks, was quieter, so Stewart and I, robbed of connections with London, marched out of the bronze doors down the centre of the deserted streets to our hotels, our hands in the air.
The trial took place under heavy security with a tank outside and the court ringed by soldiers.
Since the 1967 war, Israel has deliberately ringed the city with a chain of suburbs that now house some 200,000 Jews.
In those days it was usual for the Okinawan sailors conveying Chinese envoys to sacrifice a pig or a goat when crossing the Heishuigou.Down in the Yaeyama islands in southern Okinawa, lush green dollops ringed by coral reefs, a tiny handful of old men know the Senkakus well.
A dusty town, ringed by green orchards watered from the Indus river, it is festooned with welcoming banners and billboards.
(There's no need to get deep into "literally surrounded" here, but it's unlikely that his office was ringed with Democratic senators at the time of the e-mail).
They took a blood sample, ringed the creature and then released it.
It is sandwiched between Mumbai's two main railway lines and ringed by six stations.
