Heh. You could have fooled me, but being European, I can recognize England even at 90° degrees. I once did a tabletop campaign map with an top-down map of Denmark.

Anyway, 'bout the scale: Maybe it's easier to just say "Hm, I want this roughly equal in length to Europe", then figure out the appropriate length and take it from there.

It will circumvent what happened to me: That you placed spots on the map and then had to decide how away they were from each other...