Do I need to say more? I didn’t think I’d be posting many if any new funky place name entries, but today I found these two ‘hamlets’ in remarkably close proximity to each other:
Hole. Wouldn’t you love to live in a place called Hole? Just for the novelty.
Holes Hole!!! Huh?
Utter genius, I mean seriously? Holes Hole? I’d love to know the origins of some of these names…
The land of clotted cream teas and the Hound of the Baskervilles, yes, I’m back in Devon again, this time for a month or so. Sadly this isn’t a month-long cake and climbing orgy, but a month of driving and work again (for anyone unfamiliar with this blog, I came down here back in March for two weeks to work doing some radio drive testing, and now I’m back doing it again, but in more detail and with slightly modified kit). Despite having my climbing and outdoorsy-ness suddenly curtailed, I am actually glad to be down here as a) I’m earning money and b) I’m going to spend some time on Dartmoor. Hell I may even wangle c) some climbing in Cornwall…
So anyway, the blog may be a bit quiet for the next month or so, unless anything interesting happens. The vast majority of my time will be spent simply driving, although the nature of the roads and the area mean that ‘simply driving’ can be somewhat more difficult than one might think…
Yes, that is a tree across the road. Yes the road was a very narrow single track where I couldn’t turn around. Yes I had to reverse back up it through the ruts and with both wing mirrors in the hedges on each side simultaneously. Yes it was about half a mile back to the junction where I could finally turn. Yes I was laughing the whole time.
Well, this will be my final ‘devonshire place names’ post as I am now finally back home.
I may or may not write about my first contracting experiences in another post, depending on whether or not I can write anything vaguely interesting to read – after all, work is primarily a very boring pastime.
So anyway, enough waffle, for my final post I offer you the following:
Newbuildings, although ironically the state of the sign did echo the state of the village – mostly old and tatty!
Beer. I must confess, I was originally taking a photograph of a place I’d misread as ‘Faraway’, but did score the village of Beer on the bonus diagonal angle (clue, it’s on the diagonal sign pointing away from us, and yes, I should have exercised a deal more awareness with my photography of this one – sorry!)
Black Dog. Sadly I didn’t manage to find a roadsign for the village of ‘Black Cat’ to accompany this one, but I genuinely did drive through a place called Black Cat on the same day as my visit to Black Dog, no word of a lie guv’!
And finally, the fabulously named Nomansland.
My two weeks of solitary car confinement did open my eyes to just how wonderful and varied the UK really is – not only does our country possess a startling variety of differing landscapes and geography, but our heritage is also full of delightfully colourful linguistics. It is really interesting to go and read a little about the way some of these seemingly bizarre place names actually evolved – the vast majority of them make huge sense once you start getting into it all.
Anyway, enough prattle. I must say that I never anticipated finding quite such a large number of truly odd village names, the highlights, for me, being ‘Leg O’ Mutton’, ‘Chipshop’, and ‘Nomansland’. Utterly fantastic – I'd love to have an address in one of these villages.
Disclaimer: I do not mean to cause any offense or bad feeling to anyone unfortunate to live in a place with a ridiculous name, but I’m afraid I have a very juvenile sense of humour sometimes, and bizarre place names do make me giggle – sorry!
Travelling around Devon with nothing to do other than drive and listen to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (or my very eclectic selection of music), means that my mind has taken to amusing itself most of the time, with things that are usually either stunningly trivial (such as ‘what shall I buy on my next trip to Tesco’s?’), or wonderfully juvenile (such as ‘WTF?! That cannot be a real place name – I have to go there!’). Hence the start of my new ‘ridiculous places’ collection. My aim is simple – go to as many bizarrely named places as possible (only within Devon at this stage), and take a photograph to illustrate the awesomeness. So here are today’s highlights:
Crapstone. I would love to know how you could possibly tell someone you live in a village called CRAPSTONE, without giggling or feeling massively embarrassed and self-conscious…
Chipshop. At first I really didn’t think this was a village name. I really did assume that the first sign I saw was pointing me to a purveyor of tasty grease, but as I drove around it did eventually dawn on me that this place was actually a real village called CHIPSHOP. Wow. Just wow. I really don’t know if it’ll get much odder than this one – perhaps it has some odd pronunciation so that you can make it sound less like you live above ‘The Codfather’ in Luton…
Well yesterday I got back home after another wee trip north of the border, this time to the west – Fort William being home base.
Friday was spent travelling up whilst going slowly mad listening to Abba. Yes, that’s right – Abba. I actually now can’t quite remember what it was exactly that started the initial Abba conversation, but that doesn’t really matter – what does matter is that we ended up listening to ‘Abba Gold’ for a good portion of the journey once we were north of Glasgow. This was fine for a while, until our minds began to wander away into the mist, eventually becoming lost in a white out of ridiculous new ad-libbed lyrics, all on a porno theme, all sung at full volume in order to overpower the originals. Lots of giggling ensued, especially after my rendition of ‘Dogging Queen’…
Ok back on topic: Saturday we had originally planned to head up to the Ben to do Tower Ridge, but after arriving at some stupid time in the evening on Friday (and then having to eat etc etc), neither of us could quite face setting the alarm for 5am. Hence the slightly daft (given the conditions and forecasts) idea to head up to Aonach Mor.
Now, I’d never climbed on Aonach Mor before, and was [mistakenly] under the impression that it was a short easy walk-in after you got off the Gondola. I wasn’t completely expecting a chair-lift ride (which, actually was in a sad way rather exciting for me, having never ridden a proper chair lift before), followed by a 40min hack up hill to get to the top of the East Face. Still, in hindsight it was actually quite a short, easy walk-in in Scottish terms, just not in my weedy little anglo-welsh terms. Hmm.
So once at the top (with only 3 other teams present…surprising for a weekend), we headed to the top of Easy Gulley where I was to be presented with a couple more things I’d never really done before – abseiling over a cornice (free hanging for a brief moment!), off of a snow bollard. Now, I’ve played with snow bollards before, and I’ve seen and avoided cornices, but this was something new and not a little unnerving, but thankfully uneventful.
Once at the bottom we headed round to find our route. We had originally thought of having a look at doing the classic grade IV, ‘White Shark’, but when we couldn’t even spot it, we ended up round at the foot of ‘Left Twin’, another crag classic where one of the other parties we’d met at the top were engaged in battle. By this point Patrick had realised he’d dropped an axe somewhere and after a brief moment of swearing, headed off to find it whilst I sat and amused myself at the base of the route.
From below it looked fine – straight forward grade III. No problemo, or at least it wouldn’t have been had the snow been even vaguely consolidated and the ice partially hard. Sadly both snow and ice were mushy. Patrick nobly led the first pitch to a good belay, but unfortunately for me, whilst I was seconding up the near vertical mush section, the guys above dislodged a load of snow which slide merrily down the gulley and funnelled straight onto me with the force of a medium sized waterfall. Another first – being hit by a spindrift avalanche. Yummy.
So once I had finally swum my way up to the belay I found myself feeling tired, shaky and less than happy – so I assumed the position of ‘weedy girl partner’ and let Patrick lead the next pitch too. All I will say about that pitch is the gear was shite (ice screws in mush that would probably have pulled out by hand), the snow/ice was shite (axes slicing nicely through like knives in butter – not really what you want), and a couple of moves at the top were on vertical rime. You can imagine how fun it wasn’t. Once at the top of this pitch I ran up the final one and over the cornice to the top and safety.
The guidebook does say that Left Twin gets Grade IV in poor condition, and I would completely agree with this – it was in a serious and not a completely straight forward condition when we did it. Nice. But still, all winter experience is useful – climbing crud definitely gives you a good grounding of skills and knowledge.
