Howputting Stinky Bay on the map will save lives

Until recently, you didn’t want to find yourself in peril near Nuncle Dicks. Neither was it a good idea to come to grief underneath Yellow Dog with No Teeth Bridge, to capsize off Robinson Crusoe Rock or get caught by a storm in Borstal Boys Ponds.

The reason is that when you phoned 999 there was a good chance the coastguard would not have had a clue what you were talking about - or even that all of these places lie on the south coast of England.

No longer. The Ordnance Survey has been working with emergency services to produce a map of Britain that includes "vernacular geography", the names that everyone in the area uses but which appear on no official documents.

It has already developed a database of 6000 coastal nicknames collated from 999 operators.

Over the years they have dealt with callers in north Wales referring to the rusting beached hulk of the Duke of Lancaster ferry as the Fun Ship, callers in Blackpool’s Tower Headland asking for assistance at the Comedy Carpet and requests for emergency help at Stinky Bay, better known as Poll na Crann, the picturesque stretch of Uist coastline.

The Ordnance Survey says that bringing this knowledge into mapping has proved so useful that it wants to do the same inland .

"The data is entered by the coastguard themselves, using local knowledge," said Jeremy Morley, the Ordnance Survey’s chief geospatial scientist, who argued that this greatly increased the flexibility of the system.

"If a sector gets busy, the work is switched to a national control centre.

‘‘Because people have entered this specialist knowledge into the national system, they know what people are saying."

This means they do not have to know beforehand that the precarious- looking Lees Scar lighthouse in Cumbria is Tommy Legs or that Scab Scar is also the rather less offputting Thornwick Nab in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Neither will they be confused by the tendency of coastal residents to christen landmarks with names such as Pissy Mare, Shittin Heugh and the Camel’s Humps.

Instead, when a caller tells the operator that he or she is cut off by the tide on Sausage Island in Wales, they will know to send help to a scrap of land at the end of Anglesey runway.

Mr Morley said that extending the service to make it useful for inland emergencies would be harder.

Logging the nicknames of beaches was one thing, but dealing with the shifting geography of cities was quite another.

"We want to know everything from what locals call a particular rock through to what the local kids call the park," he said.

"We are trying to capture the variety and richness of place names, looking at how different groups in the population interact."