Authors Electric

Earlier this month, I fulfilled a long-held ambition. I visited Gussage All Saints! Not only that, we stayed overnight in the delightful community-run pub, The Drovers. Gussage all Saints…along with Nately Scours and Nether Wallop, some of my favourite mad place-names. It was a fluke that we were there at all – it was a Crick Crack Club night at the Earth House in Cranborne and we are in the indulgent habit of staying overnight in or close to the village afterwards so we don’t have the drive home late that night.   It’s getting more and more difficult nowadays to find anywhere taking a one-night (Saturday) booking through the season, and The Drovers was the only place in the whole South of England (according to my husband) we could have. It was away from Cranborne a bit and down narrow unlit lanes, but absolutely worth it. There was an evening of brilliant story-telling round the fire. The final storytellers used a Japanese ritual – as a story ended, they each picked up a candle,...

I don’t know if there’s a word for the condition of being just a teeny bit obsessed with place names, but if there is, I’ve got it. It might have started somewhere around Oxford, when I first saw the sign reading Milton Chilton Didcot Wantage. Lovely, yumpty-tumpty rhythm. It makes me smile and shout it out every time we drive past it. In case you’re wondering, I have not been ejected from the car. Yet. In contrast, in Laurie Lee country, there’s a sign at the end of a gloomy lane through overhanging trees which reads Cold Slad Only. It’s enough to strike chill into the stoutest heart. Who’d ever want to go there? Up towards Basingstoke from here there is Nately Scours. It’s what a very rafeened lady might whisper to her doctor about an embarrassing nocturnal problem. Somerset is a particularly rich source of these delights: Bishop’s Hull Within, Bishop’s Hull Without (what?); Nempnett Thrubwell (can one thrub badly?); Wumbrock (badgers?); Hammoon (wolves?); Ryme Intrinsica ...