Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

The joy of rude place names

Last week a gentle Norfolk waterway got into trouble with Facebook. The problem was its name — Cockshoot Dyke. Facebook’s relentless algorithms blocked posts that mentioned the dyke and issued notifications warning about ‘sexual content’ and ‘violence’.

The name of this stretch of water isn’t, of course, actually rude at all. It relates to a fowl-hunting term for a broad glade through which woodcock might fly. The joy of supposedly ‘rude’ place names lies in their innocence. The village of Upperthong, near Huddersfield, is named after the Old English words uferra (upper) and thwang (a narrow strip of land), while Twatt in Orkney comes from the Old Norse þveit, meaning ‘small piece of land’.

I’ve always felt some affinity for places with unusual names. I grew up in a tiny Shropshire village called Clunton (one letter from trouble). People would often ask me to repeat myself when I told them where I lived, thinking they’d misheard. Residents of the nearby and charmingly named Hopton Wafers never suffered such embarrassment, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Only a Puritan — or a Facebook algorithm — wouldn’t snigger at Pett Bottom, Ugley, Titty Ho, Low Cock How or Wetwang.

Last month a man called Paul Taylor set off on a 1,800-mile moped journey across England and Scotland, visiting the places with the ‘rudest’ names to raise money in memory of a friend of his who had died of cancer. He started his journey in Shitterton, a hamlet near Bere Regis in Dorset, and set off for Twatt, taking in places such as Brawl (in Scotland), Sandy Balls holiday village (in Hampshire) and ending at the village of Bell End in Worcestershire.

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