The Dog That Turned Into Green Mist, Cows Standing On Hind Legs & Other Cases Of Gibbering Insanity

[catseye]

I’ve looked at Chisledon on Google Earth and found nothing called Pinham Bottom so it must be an old name,

This must be a bigger problem than we know. I do a walk from my village around the local hills and someone asked me if I went up Golden Hill. No, said I, I walk over there. That is Golden Hill, I was told, although how I was supposed to know when it's not named on any map and there is absolutely nothing even pale yellow about it, I'm not sure.

And the house I used to live in was called St Catherines when I lived there. So I could have told any number of stories of the 'haunting of St Catherines' (well, I couldn't really but my daughter did report a black shape rush along the landing and down the stairs that she thought was her sister until her sister turned out to still be in her room), but as the house has now changed name, nobody would be able to track down the source.

Honestly. Can we just not nail nameplates to everywhere so we are all talking about the same places?

 

[Fanari_Lloyd]

It tends to be the old OS maps that show the ‘local’ (or older) names, I think, though not always. One of my aunts, whose family had lived in the area for four hundred years, knows a lot of old names for woods, fields, lanes, hills etc that just aren’t recorded.

 

[escargot]

You tempted me to try and seek this book out, but then I checked my collection to see I already have it. So temptation now turns to re-reading it. After I finish my second read of LOTR.

Yup, at the Wellcome Foundation public library in London I once took a random book down to read for the time I had available there.
Liked it so much I tried to order it on Kindle, and found I already had it. Happy days.

Kate Listers's awesome A Curious History of Sex, in case you're curious. A cracking read.