England is a place next to the Wirral

Here's a Multimap screengrab I took today:


Is it just me, or does this map make it look like (the) Wirral and England are two neighbouring places? You can find the town of England just east of the Wirral...

(For those who don't know, the Wirral is a peninsula in England, albeit close to Wales.)

King's Cliffe, King's Cliff, Kings Cliff, Kingscliffe

I've had another serendipitous Wikipedia discovery: the entry on Kings Cliffe, Northamptonshire.

As the entry says, this village is "variously King's Cliffe, King's Cliff, Kings Cliff, Kingscliffe".

I don't have my gazetteer to hand, but both Google Maps and the AA Route Planner opt for Kings Cliffe. I wonder whether the other spellings remain in much use.

The village used to have a railway station; Wikipedia refers to this as both Kingscliffe and King's Cliffe station.

Too many Washingtons

I had to change a live web story today because it described a certain UK-based company as being "US-based". The writer had seen on the company's website that its headquarters were in Washington and he assumed that meant Washington DC (or Washington state, I suppose).

In fact, the company is based in - you guessed it - Washington, Tyne and Wear, right here in England.

I can't really criticise the writer, though, because I was the sub who worked on the story before it went live and let the blunder past. Oops.

Field Stile Road / Fieldstile Road

While one English city has banned apostrophes from its street names "to avoid confusion", it seems that not everywhere in the UK is so worried about consistency in naming:






Sorry about the awful picture quality, I took the photos in the dark with my camera phone.

The road is in Southwold, Suffolk, by the way.

Fawley, Fawley, Fawley, Fawley

A serendipitous find: the Wikipedia page on the place name 'Fawley'.

There is a Fawley in Berkshire, another in Buckinghamshire, a third in Hampshire and a fourth in Herefordshire. In each instance, the 'Faw' part of the place name has a different origin/etymology.

Well, I thought it was interesting.