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Calthrop

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When a place-name seems to be animal-related: most often, it isn't. Thus Harefield's name comes from the Anglo-Saxon here = army (Danish army -- its English counterpart would be fyrd), felle = field. Likewise Foxdale, Isle of Man: from the Old Norse fors-dal = waterfall dale or valley.
 

Calthrop

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Robert Burns visited Stonehaven in 1787. He got around quite a bit, did old Rabbie -- including, by contrast, to the west coast (sort-of) at Inveraray, Argyll and Bute.
 
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Inveraray is a planned town designed at least in part by John Adam for the Duke of Argyll. John's little brother Robert designed the village of Lowther in Cumbria for the Earl of Lonsdale, and - although unfinished - a very fine and urbane job he did of it.
 
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In 1676 the parish church of St Columb Major was blown up by three local youths. In 1943 the parish church of Isleworth in west London was burned down by two local boys who two days earlier had fired the church at Hounslow.
 

Calthrop

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David Attenborough -- most famous for his presentation of television natural-history documentary films -- was born in Isleworth, but spent his childhood in Leicester; his father was principal of Leicester University.
 

Calthrop

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Like Attenborough, I was born in the West Middlesex Hospital, but that is by the by.

Oakham is also the county town of a county not named after its county town.

Carlisle is also twinned with a settlement in the German State of Schleswig-Holstein. Oakham's "twin" is Barmstedt; Carlisle's, Flensburg (nicely appropriate; both are border towns on southern side of respective borders).

(As a kid, I read about convicts in the bad old days, being set to picking oakum. I didn't have the wit to systematically look the word up, or ask an adult about it; so imagined that it must be some rare wild plant or crop, useful for some purpose and difficult and unpleasant to gather; which grew only in Rutland.)
 
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Calthrop

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Reading would seem long to have been, in the public perception, an unlikeable place (among other things, it's where poor old Oscar Wilde was imprisoned) -- Jerome K. Jerome calls it, in Three Men in a Boat, "dirty, dismal Reading". In the same book, Jerome writes approvingly of Iffley, very near Oxford.
 

Calthrop

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Oundle's Talbot Hotel is said to contain an oak staircase from nearby (demolished) Fotheringhay Castle; which Mary Queen of Scots walked down when being escorted to her execution there in 1587, and which is said thus to be haunted by her ghost. Among the many ups-and-downs of MQ of S's life: fleeing in 1568 from Scotland, she landed and overnighted in Workington, Cumbria.
 

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In 1955 the Butlins chain of holiday resorts bought up four seaside hotels in Cliftonville, which were situated close to each other, and marketed them together as the 'Cliftonville Hotels'. During Butlins' heyday, another two hotels in Cliftonville were added, but most of these are now demolished, with one survivor converted to apartments.

Another Butlins holiday camp - still trading, as far as I can see - is in Devon at Minehead.
 

Calthrop

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In World War II, practice for the Normandy landings was also carried out at Slapton, South Devon -- geographical features at each place, useful for the purpose. At Burton Bradstock it was the cliffs; at Slapton, lagoons and sandbars.
 

Calthrop

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The author Graham Greene lived briefly in the 1930s, in Chipping Campden. One of Greene's most acclaimed novels is, of course, Brighton Rock.
 

Calthrop

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Kate Ellis writes a series of, in my opinion agreeable, crime / thriller novels -- for me, nicely balanced between saccharinely "cosy", and pitilessly nasty -- centring on the doings of the police and their detective section, in a thinly-disguised area of South Devon. Her "Morbay" is clearly Torquay; and her "Tradmouth" (with its police station, the centre of what goes on in the books), Dartmouth.
 

Calthrop

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Buckfastleigh, with 13 letters in its name, is one of the longest place names in England with no repeated letters. In this, it is tied with Buslingthorpe in Leeds; and Buslingthorpe (Lincolnshire); but exceeded by -- with 14 letters -- Bricklehampton, Worcestershire (near Evesham). According to some, Bricklehampton has the longest-name-with-no-repeated-letters not only in England, but in the English-speaking world. (Not a lot of people know that.)
 

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Uppermill lies on the River Tame; which rises near Denshaw, also in Greater Manchester.
 

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