Christopher HOWSE

It’s a long way from Bridlington to the Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, as listeners to the shipping forecast will be aware. Bridlington is of course in what we used to call the East Riding, and the marvellous light vessel, with no human crew, like the Flying Dutchman, is where X marks the spot if you draw a line running due east from the South Foreland of the white cliffs of Dover and another running north from the Sandettie Bank off Calais.

The mere mention of the latter sandbank or shoal makes the blood run cold in the veins of plucky mariners tuning in after Sailing By. But in the big gap of 300 miles between there and Bridlington is a spot called Crazy Mary’s Hole. It is not mentioned on the shipping forecast, but it’s not as bad as legend suggests.

The Ordnance Survey and the Coastguard Agency have just joined forces to ensure that anyone ringing up in distress from Crazy Mary’s Hole will immediately be pinpointed by its rescue helicopters, speedboats, dirigibles and trained sniffer seals.

The hole, near Pakefield, Suffolk, was thought during the First World War to be an Achilles’ heel for coastal defences, but sentries were said to be frightened to keep watch by night alone for fear of the ghost of Mary, crazed by the loss of her fisherman husband and still haunting the cliffs.

Crazy Mary’s Hole is held up by the Ordnance Survey as an important example of how thousands of local “nicknames” that it has collected can help in the 33,000 incidents to which the Coastguard Agency responds each year. But all place names are really nicknames. They weren’t written up on signs or written down on maps before people started using them.

It is true that place names have been getting primmer and more proper in the past century or so. For hundreds of years places we might think of as Lovers’ Lane attracted an unrepeatable name beginning with Grope. A palimpsest of this cruder convention survives (safely inland) in Oxford, in the street name Grove Court.

That’s the rudest name I know, but the Crazy Mary view of country life envisages a benighted traveller phoning in a Pam Ayres voice and wailing: “Oim up to moi wheel-arches in the Piddle and moi big end’s gorn.” The Piddle is a perfectly respectable river in Dorset, taking its name from the Old English word for a marsh.

The Ordnance Survey has gathered a fine collection of funny coastal names: Borstal Boy’s Ponds, Nuncle Dicks, Electric Beach, Toe End and Yellow Dog with No Teeth Bridge. The real trouble is not that the country is littered with comic Mummerset names but that, locally, places are known by the same name as hundreds of others: the Cliff, the Dip, the Headland.

So next time you’re down Crazy Mary’s Hole, take a dark lantern, oilskins and a sou’wester, and some Kendal Mint Cake, and leave the Coastguard in peace.