from Milly Molly Mandy, by Joyce Lankester Brisley
Checking the map recently, on the way to visit my father in Sussex, I got drawn - as always - into exploration of the map-minutiae: the multiplicity of little tors, copses and valleys; the generous spattering of "historic" symbols indicating earthworks, monuments and other ancient remnants; the water water everywhere, thin blue veins meandering up, down and around the contour lines.
And I take a particular delight, always, in some of the place-names.
The names below - towns and villages - all come from a section of Sussex in South East England. They are the kind of place names which I imagine appearing on a map like the one shown above, which comes from one of the books I loved as a child.
Some of the names we spotted in Sussex might be suggestive of a particular type of resident:
Catsfield
Warbleton
Crabbet Park
Plumpton Green
Muddles Green
Cackle Street
Limpsfield
Wartling
Ripe
don't some of these conjure up delightful images?
Some of them are prosaic and - possibly - descriptive:
Small Field
Underriver
Crouch
some of them are simply picturesque:
Rose Hill
Sunnyside
Brightling
or its opposite:
Foul Mile
Hellingly
(what is term for the opposite of picturesque?)
while some of them hint tantalizingly at some past history:
Tarring Neville
Saint Hill
Blackboys
Toy’s Hill
Iron’s Bottom
And some of them appeal to me for no clearly definable reason:
Flimwell
Pease Pottage
Small Dole
In which of these places do you think you'd choose to live?
