Anne-Marie,

Check out the Digital Chart of the World site http://www.maproom.psu.edu/dcw/ .  You'll be able to download UK coastline in ESRI E00 format, not sure if they have county boundaries though.  Might also be worth finding out if your University is a member of EDINA http://edina.ed.ac.uk/index.shtml  as they have access to a range of digital datasets.

Hope this helps.

Greg

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