Wyn Drabble: The strangest place names in Britain

Wyn Drabble has just read Bill Bryson's "The Road to Little Dribbling" and it got him thinking. Photo / NZME

Given it was published in 2015, I'm a little ashamed to reveal that I have only just read Bill Bryson's "The Road to Little Dribbling".

One of the things it has rekindled in me is a love of some of the delightfully quaint place names used in Britain. Little Dribbling, it appears, is not a real name, but one Bryson has made up to represent and draw attention to these quirky names. To celebrate them, even.

My initial experience of such names came in the 1970s, when I first travelled on the London Tube. Tooting and Cockfosters were the first to tickle my fancy, but little did I know that my fancy was about to be tickled more vigorously.

Scotland has Brokenwind and Fattiehead, for example, while in the north of England we can enjoy Crackpot, No Place, Giggleswick and Wetwang.

Naturally, any curious mind wants to know how these places earned such names, but I'm afraid the results of research are often dull. Brokenwind, for example, probably got its name from an earlier spelling, Brokenwynd, in which 'wynd' means a narrow curving path or lane leading off a main road.

Suggestions for No Place include a possible shortening of North Place, or that the original houses of the village stood on a boundary between two parishes, neither of which would accept the village.

Wyn Drabble

And Giggleswick is actually no laughing matter. It is named after a Viking called Gigel and 'wich/wick/wyke', which is Old Norse for farm or settlement.

I'm sure you'll agree that those explanations, while interesting enough, are not particularly entertaining, so my suggestion is to do as I do; make up your own explanations for the names. It's far more rewarding, far more fun.

Here are a few – all real – to get you started: Blubberhouses, Barton in the Beans, Chemistry, Mumbles and Great Snoring. Near Cambridge there is Matching Tye (birthplace of Rik Mayall). What fun!

Near Bath is Curry Mallet, and further south you will find Brown Willy, Droop, Loose Bottom and Crapstone. Please try to keep your explanations suitable for a general audience (parental guidance is advised).

Here is an alphabetical list of some others to have fun with: Balls Cross, Bishop Spit, Boggy Bottom, Greedy Gut, Greenslap, Land of Nod, Penistone, Pratt's Bottom, Pucklechurch, Rotten End, Sandy Balls, Scratchy Bottom, Spanker Lane, Upperthong, Ugley and Westward Ho! (The exclamation mark is not mine but part of the name! (That one was mine.))

So caught up in the spirit of this am I that I resolved to create a few of my own. Surely Drabble would lend itself to some sort of mockable explanation, but I'll leave that to you readers to have fun with.

So, what I came up with were Lower Piddlepot and Upper Piddlepot. Or should they be Greater Piddlepot and Lesser Piddlepot?

And if Piddlepot were a surname, the schoolboy brothers would be Piddlepot major and Piddlepot minor. If a third brother came along, he could be Little Piddlepot. Or Pee-wee Piddlepot.

To conclude I would like to return to Bryson. In an earlier book he wrote a sentence I have never forgotten because of its sheer wit, but I realise some will find it distasteful. It was, if I remember rightly, describing a (very bad) burger in Sweden: "To say it was crappy would be to malign faeces."

A description I've just read in "The Road to Little Dribbling" will stay with me too (discretion again advised). It describes a group of train-spotters standing on a station platform and holding clipboards and notebooks.

"They all looked like the sort of people who had never had sex with anything they couldn't put in a cupboard afterwards."