A FORTNIGHT ago in this space, I was marvelling at Danish Scurvy Grass, the grubby little white flower which is colonising our central reservations.

It thrives on salt and stuck to the coast until the mid-1980s when it discovered that the grit that is copiously spread on our roads during water has burnt salty strips along the verges in which it can grow.

It is now the fastest spreading plant in Britain, and you can spot it flowering on the saltburn strip beside any main road or motorway, as my recent travelling companions will testify.

It acquired its unusual name because sailors discovered that by eating it in salads, its saltiness and high Vitamin C content helped them beat scurvy – old salt Captain James Cook was a keen advocate of its consumption.

David Walsh, in Skelton, goes one step further. “It is interesting that another salt-loving plant, samphire, was so common on the Tees estuary that there was a settlement called Samphire Batts,” he says. “Samphire, like scurvy grass, was and is edible and was used in salads.”

Samphire takes its name from St Peter – saint pierre – who is the patron saint of fishermen. It is known as “poor man’s asparagus”, although it isn’t just eaten by the poor – it was on the table for Charles and Diana’s wedding breakfast, freshly delivered from the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, in 1981.

It grew so prolifically on the Durham bank of the Tees in the early 18th Century that the mudflats were known as Samphire Batts. When the Clarence Railway, itself named after the Duke of Clarence who became King William IV, arrived on the banks in 1833 bringing Durham coal, the batts were renamed Port Clarence.

The samphire could have been collected for salad, or it could have been heaped into huge piles and burnt. The ash would then have been heated with sand to produce a primitive form of glass.

Two hundred years later, does samphire still grow on the batts, or has it too lost out to the scourge of scurvy grass?

THERE are batts in Bishop Auckland, Richmond, Ripon, Colburn and Bedale, although there are no batts in the dictionary. It seems to be a part of riverbank that is covered by high water – either tide or flood. Often, a shingle island in the middle of the river is part of the batts, and quite often the batts have been quarried for either gravel or sand. I can’t find an explanation of where this Yorkshirey word comes from – the batts are enough to drive you batty.

LAST week, I offered the fascinatingly useless piece of information that bookkeeper is the only word in the English language that has three consecutive double letters. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) confirms that it is one word without a hyphen, unlike sweet-tooth which would otherwise rival it.

In response, Eric Gendle from Nunthorpe offers “a trivial observation” which is equally useless but even more fascinating. He says: “There is said to be an American occupation called a subbookkeeper, which would have four sets of double letters in succession.”

The internet is rife with people proclaiming the uniqueness of subbookkeeper, but disappointingly, the OED refuses to accept it as a proper world. This is a shame, because if the subbookkeeper had someone working under him, he would be the soussubookkeeper.