Saturday 19 October 2024

Welcome To Where??

The River Piddle runs through Dorset and on it's winding banks were Piddletown and Tolpiddle but in the 1950's they changes the i vowel to a u and they became Puddletown and Tolpuddle because too many people were..ahem,  taking the piss but some places in the UK revel in their names so we have Pity Me, Twatt, Titty Hill, Thong, Wetwang, Cockup, Shitterton, Penistone, Brown Willy, Sandy Balls, Cockermouth and Bell End but we are not the only country to have places which make you wonder how the devil they got that name.
In Canada there is Unfortunate Cove, Sorrow Islands, Mount Misery, Mount Doom, Slough of Despond and Futile Lake while it's neighbour to the South has  people giving their address as Mount Despair, Mistake Island, Point No Point, Gloomy Lake, Defeated, Mount Disappointment, Widows Island, Boring, Death Valley, Forlorn Hope Spring , Looneyville and Bald Knob.
One Australian place which definitely shouldn't be thought on too long on the origins of its name is Cockburn, especially when they also have Melancholy Waterhole, Cape Grim, Suicide Bay and Lake Disappointment.
The Antarctic has islands called Inexpressible and Reluctant while Norway has Hell and Worlds End, Chile has a Useless Bay, Ukraine somewhere called Nameless Place and Denmark has Middlefart but it is to Central Europe and Austria where you should head if you want to nick the City Entrance signs.
They do have somewhere called Wind Passing but nobody can beat the place named after the 6th century Bavarian Nobleman Focko, or to give it's proper name, Fucking, although there have been several attempts to change the name but as the Fucking Mayor said: 'For us Fucking is Fucking and it's going to stay Fucking, we have been Fucking for 800 years' although the boring Austrians did finally change it to Fugging in 2021.

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