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Settlement Association

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Calthrop

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Virley doesn't appear in my road atlas; and is barely mentioned in Wiki -- though I was aware of the tiny settlement of that name: used to have relatives, frequently visited, in that area. Virley's name is often coupled with that of the neighbouring -- better-known and "with more to tell about" -- small village of Salcott, Essex: these places, a little way north of Tollesbury.
 

Calthrop

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Freston in Suffolk -- just south of Ipswich -- also has a pub called the Boot (the Freston Boot, to be precise).
 

Calthrop

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Swansea is also twinned with a settlement in the French departement of Pyrenees-Atlantiques. Peebles's "twin" is Hendaye; Swansea's is Pau.
 

Calthrop

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Ynysmeudwy's pub is called the Ynysmeudwy Arms. On a scene of "bigger-scale and better-known": Worcester has a pub named the Worcester Arms.
 

Calthrop

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Wiki-nitpicking (Niki-witpicking?) as often: Wiki's article on Newport IOW, describes it as being "geographically located in the centre of the Isle of Wight". It looks to me -- admittedly not scientifically, just using common sense -- from the map: that the central point of the Island is not Newport; but Blackwater, a couple of miles south of the N-metropolis.
 

Tetragon213

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Fittingly for its name, Bredbury is home to a major bakery; namely, the Stockport site of Allied Bakeries. Their head office is in Maidenhead
 

Calthrop

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Hugh Lofting (1886 -- 1947), author of the "Doctor Dolittle" books, was born in Maidenhead; and educated at Mount St.Mary's College at Spinkhill, Derbyshire -- between Chesterfield and Worksop. (Have just learned that Lofting spent the second half of his life in the USA.)
 
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Calthrop

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I never miss a chance for a dig at my least-favourite author, Jane Austen -- one of those people who seem, one way and another, to show up almost everywhere. Parts of her Sense and Sensibility are set in London's Mayfair; and Portsmouth is the original home of the heroine of Austen's Mansfield Park (the book has, in fact, nothing to do with Mansfield in Nottinghamshire).
 

Calthrop

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Inverness also has a rather odd nickname, with "possible but not certain" suggestions as to its origin. Devonport is called "Guz", particularly by Royal Navy personnel -- maybe reference to Devonshire cream teas: a good "guzzle". Inverness is called "Inversnecky" or "The Sneck" -- possibly from a routine by the comedian Harry Gordon.
 

Calthrop

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Aith in West Shetland Mainland also has an RNLI lifeboat station.
This settlement and lifeboats: Aith holds every June, a Lifeboat Gala to raise money for the RNLI. This event includes doings by a "jarl squad" -- local speciality -- one takes it, a Viking-re-enactment thing. Shetland's Up-Helly-Aa fire festival, held early in the year to mark the end of the Yule season: happens most renownedly and on biggest scale, in the islands' capital Lerwick; involving numerous jarl squads.

(Seeing the name "Aith" here: brought to mind for me, a piece by a sci-fi / alternative-history author whose work I enjoy. This is a "long short story" which I find splendidly daft: its premise, an alternative historical time-line in which, way back, English-speaking nations and their language and culture became and remained overwhelmingly Norse / Saxon / Celtic -- Latin, and things "Romance" generally, didn't get a look-in. The hero -- an inadvertent traveller from "our, real, time-line" -- is in this one's equivalent of New York [only its name in the "alternative", is New Belfast], trying to impersonate a local bishop [long, complicated story]: he tends to get in bother therein, through his propensity to erupt verbally with what the shocked locals call "frickful aiths".)
 
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Calthrop

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The last woman to be publicly hanged in Scotland, was Mary Timney in 1862, at Dumfries (found guilty of a particularly gruesome murder). Her counterpart re England, was Frances Kidder: at Maidstone, Kent, in 1868.
 
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Maidstone has a museum of coaches and carriages. Chemsford, Essex, boasts Lodge's Vintage Coach Museum - motor coaches rather than the horse-drawn stuff favoured in Kent - but a museum of coaches nonetheless.
 

Calthrop

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Maidstone has a museum of coaches and carriages. Chemsford, Essex, boasts Lodge's Vintage Coach Museum - motor coaches rather than the horse-drawn stuff favoured in Kent - but a museum of coaches nonetheless.
(Pedantic-precisian department: taking it that "Chelmsford" is meant) -- I have a fondness for the Canadian Province of New Brunswick. Chelmsford; and Stanley, Perth & Kinross: both have namesake settlements in that province.
 
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The pit village of Rosewell was established by coal owner Archibald Hood, who also developed mines at (inter alia) Llwynypia in Glamorgan, where my forbears worked, my grandfather as a colliery engine house stoker, his father as an engine driver.
 

Calthrop

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Llywynypia's name means -- in Welsh of course -- "the grove of the magpie": name of the farm which, pre-industrialisation, occupied the site. Also with a reference, re that engaging if sometimes nastily-behaved bird: Wymondham in Norfolk has a street called Magpie Place.
 

johnnychips

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Appletreewick is also pronounced by missing out several letters in the centre of the name. (Wy…ndham; Ap…tr…ick).
 

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