I HAVE always thought that Lovesome Hill is a lovely name for a lonesome vill.

Lovesome Hill is just a short straggle of houses midway between somewhere on the A167 north of Northallerton, with its little rise being crowned by a distinctive water tower.

Nowadays, the road goes in a cutting beneath the houses, but on Wednesday night I was invited to speak to the Women’s Institute there, and so for the first time, I had reason to pull off the A167, up the ramp into the hamlet.

The WI – which is named after the even smaller hamlet of Hutton Bonville, which is nearby – meets in the village hall, which used to be the school. One of the ladies remembered starting there at the age of four, when there were just 11 children aged up to 11 in the one class taught by the one teacher.

Even the most isolated of places has its moment in the national spotlight. Lovesome Hill’s, I discover, was on May 15, 1914, when what The Northern Echo the following day described as “one of the most serious disasters in the annals of aviation” occurred there. This looks to be an astonishing story that I need to investigate more fully, but at least four biplanes from the Royal Flying Corps – practically our entire air force – hit an impenetrable bank of fog over Lovesome Hill and crashlanded. The mangled remains of the two fliers who died that day were retrieved from the fields and laid out in the home of the Lovesome Hill joiner.

But the story I was most intrigued in was how Lovesome Hill go its lovely name.

During the Napoleonic Wars at the start of the 18th Century, the A167 between Darlington and Northallerton was anything but straight, meandering like one of my articles into all sorts of strange bywaters. This was holding up the passage of military supplies and so French Prisoners of War – some sources say Irish navvies – were ordered to straighten the road.

As they did so, they dug through a farm called Lowsey Hill, which their foreign tongues pronounced as “lousy”. To the roadmakers, it was probably an apposite name for the site of an awkward job, but the locals were outraged. How would you sell your house if you lived in Lousy Hill?

So when the labourers were gone, the villagers changed their name to the romantic Lovesome Hill.

A FEW hours after finishing last week’s column about the different words for toilet – lavatory, loo, netty, WC etc – the National Trust tweeted a link to a new article on its website about the same subject.

They had one derivation I had missed: “the john”. Sir John Harington was Queen Elizabeth’s godson, although she banned him from court for telling risqué stories to the ladies. With nothing to do in his exile at his stately home in Bath, in 1596 he invented the first flushing toilet – a complex contraption of handles, levers and weights which caused water to empty the pan into the cesspit below. He called it an “ajax” which was a pun on the slang word “jakes” for privy.

The Queen called round to announce she was lifting her ban, and so Sir John showed her his ajax.

The Queen was so impressed that she demanded “a john” be installed in Richmond Palace.

Despite the royal seal of approval, the john did not catch on – it was another 200 years before the S-bend was invented and the flush became a reality. The john, therefore, was just a flash in the pan.