I am the county count, and I love to count counties

A quick follow-up to my last post in which I controversially claim that vast swathes of Eastern England do not exist - here is a very unscientific survey of counties which end in "shire" and some details about their associated towns, or rather the implied associated town that you end up with if you strip off the "shire" from the county name. There are a host of caveats to this, most obviously that the concept of a "county" is, like many other things, a more loosely-defined and ambiguous thing than you might initially suppose. As an obvious example, what we're really talking about here are the ceremonial counties of England, but these are really only retained as a quaint historical artefact these days, and the "proper" county list contains a whole host of self-administering metropolitan areas which make the map a lot messier and render concepts like "county town" problematic.

County	Implied town	Does it exist?	County town?
Bedfordshire	Bedford	Yes	Yes
Berkshire	Berk	No	No, Reading
Buckinghamshire	Buckingham	Yes	No, Aylesbury
Cambridgeshire	Cambridge	Yes	Yes
Cheshire	Che	Chester does	No, Chester
Derbyshire	Derby	Yes	Yes
Gloucestershire	Gloucester	Yes	Yes
Hampshire	Hamp	Southampton does	Yes
Herefordshire	Hereford	Yes	Yes
Hertfordshire	Hertford	Yes	Yes
Huntingdonshire	Huntingdon	Yes	Yes
Lancashire	Lanca	Lancaster does	No, Preston
Leicestershire	Leicester	Yes	Yes
Lincolnshire	Lincoln	Yes	Yes
Northamptonshire	Northampton	Yes	Yes
Nottinghamshire	Nottingham	Yes	Yes
Oxfordshire	Oxford	Yes	Yes
Shropshire	Shrop	No	No, Shrewsbury
Staffordshire	Stafford	Yes	Yes
Warwickshire	Warwick	Yes	Yes
Wiltshire	Wilt	Wilton does	No, Trowbridge
Worcestershire	Worcester	Yes	Yes
Yorkshire	York	Yes	It's complicated

So as you can see the vast majority have an associated town which does exist and is, in most cases, generally accepted as being the county town, inasmuch as that term has any meaning any more. The exceptions are interesting and perhaps warrant a few extra notes:

• There is no county of "Yorkshire" any more; I include it merely to note that York exists (which I'm sure you knew anyway). Yorkshire is divided into four these days (North, South, East and West, broadly speaking), and even after this subdivision North Yorkshire still manages to be England's biggest county.
• Huntingdonshire doesn't exist any more either, if it ever did. I include it, like Yorkshire, just because it conforms to the pattern I'm trying to illustrate.
• The only county which definitely still exists (my earlier protestations aside), has an associated town which exists, isn't complicated by any internal metropolitan subdivisions and where the associated town isn't the county town is Buckinghamshire, presumably because Buckingham was deemed too insignificant.
• Cheshire is not, sadly, named after Che Guevara, nor indeed after Che Stadium.
• There is a subset here of counties which don't have a name which is just a town with "shire" on the end, but which nonetheless derive their name from a town. It's easy to see how this works for Lancashire, Cheshire and Wiltshire, less so for Hampshire, and much less so for Shropshire (which does indeed ultimately derive its name from Shrewsbury, via some serious mangling).
• The interesting outlier here is Berkshire, which is the only one not to derive its name from a town in some way. The current theory seems to be that it derives from a large wooded area on a hill, there evidently being nothing more interesting lying around to name it after.
• Both Devon and Dorset historically carried a "shire" on the end of their name which has since been trimmed off. Dorset derives its name from the name of a town (Dorchester), Devon does not.
• Borsetshire, by contrast, has retained its "shire", presumably so you can sing (to the Archers theme tune, of course) "let's all go to Borsetshire, it's a made-up county" and have it scan properly.