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Settlement Association

Calthrop

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Fenny Compton has a (listed) building called the Woad House -- presumably, the plant woad was in times past, treated there to make dye. Have mentioned the following, previously on this game -- just find it really "neat": the last place in Britain where woad was grown on a genuinely commercial scale, was Algarkirk in Lincolnshire (near Spalding). This operation came to an end in 1932.
 
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RailUK Forums

Calthrop

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The 19th-century builder William Webster was born in Wyberton. He is associated especially with several River Thames embankments in London; one of these involving the Southern Outfall Sewer, entering the Thames -- and featuring a pumping station at that spot, the ensemble having opened in 1865 -- at Crossness, London Borough of Bexley.
 

Calthrop

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The very well-regarded modern artist Grayson Perry was born in Chelmsford. He studied at Portsmouth College of Art and Design.
 

Calthrop

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Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort (1774 -- 1857), creator of the Beaufort Scale of wind forces, was stationed for a period at Gravesend. He was born in Navan (An Uaimh), Co. Meath.
 

Calthrop

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Moynalty village -- a relatively recent creation, only a couple of centuries old -- was originally planned and built on only one side of the road on which it lies -- on the opposite side from the river: hence the local saying "All To One Side Like The Village Of Moynalty". A resemblance here, to Parkgate, Wirral, Cheshire -- on the River Dee estuary, with the buildings on one side of the village street: the other side being right on the shoreline -- local byword thus, "Like Parkgate, all on one side".
 

Calthrop

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I'm going to be a bit railwayish (tramwayish?) too; but only as an "aside". Llandrillo is situated on the small River Ceidiog, just before it joins the Dee. Not very many miles to the east is another Dee tributary, with a name which is the exact same, save for one letter: the Ceiriog. Seven miles east-south-east of Llandrillo is the settlement, high up that river's valley, of Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog. (The Ceiriog valley of course played host at one time, to a charming steam tramway with an unusual gauge.)
 

Calthrop

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The ancient earthwork Offa's Dyke passes close to Brymbo. The first scientific excavation of said Dyke was carried out near Brymbo in 1892, by Professor Thomas McKenny Hughes; whose father was a bishop, and whose younger brother also became a bishop: of Llandaff.
 

Calthrop

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The writer and broadcaster Thomas Thompson (1880 -- 1951), great lover of, and celebrator in his works of, "all things Lancashire", was born and lived all his life in Bury. He was awarded an honorary master's degree for his scholarly contributions to dialect literature, by the University of Manchester.
 
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Manchester had Britain's first bus service (forget all that metrocentric nonsense about Shillibeer in 1829), started by John Greenwood in 1824 and running to Manchester from Pendleton.

The world's first bus service, it should be noted, was established in Paris by philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1662, just a few months before his untimely death and more than 250 years before the term bus, or omnibus, was taken to mean a public conveyance.
 

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