Great lengths

It’s a pleasant village near Thirsk, England’s longest place name, so breath taking that the coal-fired pub merely calls itself the Whitestonecliffe Inn and has done.

Wikipedia hyphenates it, villagers disconnect. The world’s longest place name, adds Wiki, is an 85-letter job which translates from the Maori as something about the mountain where the bloke with big knees serenaded his lover on a nose flute.

Britain’s is that familiar railway station village on Anglesey – where, coincidentally, the country’s first WI branch opened in 1915.

In South Africa, 27 letters translates as “The Upper End of Cut Throat Valley”; in southern Australia a 26-character name means “Where the devil urinates”.

SUTTON SIGN: Visitors arrive simply to photograph the sign

Not least because nothing much else happens – the notice board revealed little other than that the parish council is concerned about Himalayan balsam, which may be an eastern cousin of Japanese knotweed – locals are quite proud of their name.

“People come just to photograph the road sign,” said Marany Rowley, the WI secretary.

Similarly to great lengths, the talk went well. The previous meeting attracted four members; this one had around 30: nice people, great spread.

The school, the shop and the chapel are long gone. The further bad news is that, after 92 years, Sutton under Whitestonecliffe Women’s Institute will also cease to exist after the next annual meeting. That’s the long and the short of it, alas.

BRIEFER but similarly sized, Bellerby is also in North Yorkshire, near Leyburn. Once it may have been best known for a road sign which warned “Slow ducks crossing.”

Now we learn that the delightful Dorothy Walker, who until five years ago wasn’t even Bellerby’s oldest resident, has died. She was 108.

We’d first met at the Methodist Church harvest festival in 2007, thereafter invited to her birthday parties – or, at least, to some of them.

Dorothy rarely made do with only one.

She came to Bellerby at 21, taught at the village school, met her husband at the village hall dance – Bellerby of the ball, no doubt – played the parish church organ for 74 years and ever enjoyed the Wensleydale Tournament of Song.

Until recently she lived independently, washed her own windows and at 99 won £150 and a supply of dog food – the dog food was never properly explained – in Take a Break magazine’s crossword competition.

The minister called, faithfully, every Monday. “He does the clues I can’t,” she said.

Beattie Tupling, whose presence in the village allowed the At Your Service column to describe Dorothy as “Bellerby’s junior senior citizen”, died in 2009, aged 103.

A year later, the classified obits reported the passing in Boroughbridge of Mrs Joan Mary Thistlethwaite. She was 104 – and “formerly of Bellerby”. Whatever it did to the ducks, there must clearly be something in the water.

ENGLAND’S longest singleword place name is reckoned to be Cottonshopeburnfoot, a hamlet off the A68 in Northumberland which by one letter beats its neighbour, Blakehopeburnhaugh, into second place.

We thought about going on Sunday, decided that such lengths couldn’t be justified, and fell instead to contemplating the North-East’s next-longest name.

It could be Newton-under-Roseberry, near Guisborough, but as it wasn’t the weather for climbing Roseberrry Topping we went to Middleton- in-Teesdale instead.

This is what might be termed the Lambton Worm School of Journalism – you know, roaming about to pick up bits of news – though the real excitement had come a few days earlier when a fierce garage fire led to a 200-yard exclusion zone around the blazing property.

Probably it was Middleton’s biggest fire since the 1970s when the old Cosy Cinema went up and two of the village’s retained fire brigade – aged about 75 and 67 – had to be summoned from the Over-60s club.

Though they performed heroically, the county council still reduced the maximum age to 55.

The day was dank, the village hardware shop still prominently displaying something called an auto-extending emergency snow shovel, lest things become bleaker yet. A chap with a step ladder was putting fairy lights on a tree, as if it wasn’t just the weather was November-ish, but that Christmas was coming apace.

Another shop had a card advertising a Lord of the Rings Lego set for £65, or an extra £20 if already assembled.

It seemed rather to defeat the object.

There was a three-stall farmers’ market, a craft fair in the Masonic Hall – we bought a Shildon mug for £4 – and a heavy duty truck promoting the services of the Red Squirrel Ranger. The paper shop, eclectic, sold everything from the Hexham Courant to the Cumberland News, from Shooting Times to Nuts!

Nuts, so far as may be ascertained, has nothing to do with red squirrels.

The Bowlees Visitor Centre – formerly one of upper Teesdale’s many Methodist chapels – is four miles up the road. We asked what a red squirrel ranger did. They thought he trapped the grey sort.

Catering at Bowlees has been taken over by Jon Dunn and his wife Bev, who already have the much-appreciated Cafe 1618 in Middleton. We sat by the stove, much enjoyed a lamb burger and one of his “lead miners’ pasties” and decided it really wasn’t the day for further exploration.

That’s the long and short of it, really.

WHILE Bishop Auckland may no longer set out its stall as prodigiously of yore, the recent column on the town’s renaissance was mistaken to suppose that the Thursday and Saturday markets don’t exist.

Mandy Owen in Heighington points out that “at least two” traders are there, as they and their families have been for many years. Mandy’s one of them – “plants and flowers”.

Apologies.

STILL we’re mooching. After goal mooching at the Alnwick ball game, John Ward recalls Minnie the Moocher.

“My dad was a band leader. They played it so often I still know every word,” says John, now 73.

The song was written in 1931 by Cab Calloway, sold a million and inspired a film of the same name.

Nothing new under the sun, the lyrics were supposedly full of references to drug use.

In the same extended connection, we’d mentioned that the Wellington bomber was nicknamed the Wimpy – after J Wellington Wimpy, the greatest moocher of all – and that Dambusters hero Barnes Wallis was also the brains behind Concorde.

Bill Bartle demurs. Wallis’s biographer claims that his dream was for an aircraft that would fly from the UK to Australia in three hours – “using the rotation of the earth to advantage, bringing the continents together.”

It never really took off. “Sadly,” adds Bill, “Concorde was designed by a rather large committee.”