I had not realised that T.S. Eliot was a Sherlock Holmes fan until I thought to look up the word grimpen, which occurs in ‘East Coker’, in the Four Quartets: ‘On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold.’
We take grimpen to mean ‘a bog’. The OED undogmatically gives the meaning as ‘marshy area’, and the etymology as ‘uncertain’. This is no surprise since the word, it appears, was made up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Watson is on Dartmoor with Stapleton the naturalist. ‘“That is the great Grimpen Mire,” said he. “A false step yonder means death to man or beast.”’ Conan Doyle usually attaches the epithet ‘great’ to the Grimpen Mire in a Homeric manner. It must be noted that mire is the part of the name that signifies ‘a bog’.
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