British placenames

British placenames are so good you can read the map for entertainment rather than navigation. Hardington Mande-ville, Bradford Peverell, Carlton Scroop — they sound like characters in a novel. In fact, P.G. Wodehouse often raided the atlas when writing: Lord Emsworth is named after a town in Hampshire, while a village in the same county gave Reginald Shipton–Bellinger his surname. There’s plenty of silliness out there — Great Snoring in Norfolk, Matching Tye in Essex, Fryup in Yorkshire. Some good old-fashioned smut, too: Lusty Glaze, Pant, Bell End and a couple of Twatts. Kent boasts a Thong — and it’s only a mile or so from Shorne.

But enough of your sniggers. Our placenames are educational, telling the history of who was where, when. ‘Pen’ (as in Penzance) denotes a Celtic settlement: it means ‘hill’ (as does the Old English ‘-dle’, so Pendle Hill in Lancashire means ‘Hill Hill Hill’). Then the Romans built their military camps or ‘castra’, so we got Colchester, Leicester, Doncaster and the like.