Mapping Britain's Extremely Lewd, Rude, and Weird Place Names

Fanny Barks, Lickers Lane, Cockplay Hill, and Behind Butts—whoever gave Great Britain its more suggestive place names must have had a fertile imagination. The island has long been known for possessing hundreds of villages, peaks, rivers, and lanes with oddball, even obscene names. Now the British company ST&G Marvellous Maps has compiled them all together on a single, expansive wall map.

The map certainly exposes the more raucous side of Britain’s many improbable place names. Some of the names are so rude they’re scarcely even innuendo anymore. I might blush when asking for directions to Derbyshire’s Lady Hole, Hampshire’s Naked Man or—proof that a verb can also be a noun—Gloucestershire’s Hunting Butts. Cumbria’s Cock Hag and Lincolnshire’s Basic Slag Road sounds like egregious early cases of slut-shaming, while only someone who loved our furry friends a little too much could name a place Badger Dingle. Still, because I have a suggestible mind, I’m actually less disconcerted by all these than the euphemistic ick of Kent’s Bishop’s Ooze.