single to bumford mingeley, please

Needless to say this is very childish, but very amusing: an interactive map of sniggersome place-names from around the world. I presume a lot of these places share a similar set of problems, mainly tourists showing up to pose by the signs, chortle a bit and then bugger off again. Some people take souvenirs away with them; the inhabitants of Shitterton in Dorset got so pissed off with people constantly half-inching their sign that they had a new one made out of Purbeck stone weighing a ton and a half so that no-one could steal it.

A couple of the place names listed here have previously made an appearance on this very blog, specifically Brown Willy in Cornwall, Wankie (now, less amusingly, Hwange) National Park in Zimbabwe and Lord Hereford's Knob in Herefordshire. I have also been (briefly) to Lickey End, as we got towed to the car park of the Forest pub there by an AA man after my friend Mark's car broke down on the way back from Birmingham Airport after a trip to Barcelona in 1997.

Obviously no list of this sort can be exhaustive; even the large number of UK entries omits the splendid Jacks Bush between Andover and Salisbury in Hampshire, and the painful-sounding Sherburn-in-Elmet in Yorkshire. It also omits to mention the pretty Somerset village of Buckland Dinham, unremarkable enough in itself until you notice that it contains a Cock Road, and that moreover at the end of that road is a pub called The Bell. So if one were standing outside the pub one could in a very real sense be said to be standing at the Bell end of Cock Road. I know this because my friends Jon and Emma live in Buckland Dinham, and the pub organises the annual Buckland Beer Festival, which I attended way back in August 2006 when it rained almost constantly. Just to prove the point, here are some pictures.