THE old lady may have been a couple of years out, of course, though the end of the world – if not quite nigh – could be altogether closer than had been supposed.

The World’s End was mentioned, a hamlet near Sowerby, Thirsk, in last week’s column on unusual place names. As well as much more about that, we’ve heard from everyone from a chap whose great great grandfather was lock keeper at Plucks Gutter to a gentleman with a distinctly Ugley past to the man who’s always one Jump ahead. Elizabeth Sayers in Spennymoor even sends an ode to Lovesome Hill, that not wonderfully romantic hamlet between Darlington and Northallerton.

Before things become too terminal – if not Apocalypse now, then maybe by about half past seven – Armageddon with it.

KEITH PEARSON was a young PE teacher when, early Eighties, he moved from east Yorkshire to a cottage at 123 The World’s End, half an allotment thrown in to sweeten the deal. The sweetener, he says, had all the appeal of an in-flight salad.

It was the address that intrigued.

“Imagine putting that on the back of a cheque when it was still fashionable to do so. A raised eyebrow and a ‘Yeah, right’ as the cheque was discreetly slipped into the shredder.”

Though they mayhave lived on the Eve of Destruction – remember that one, Barry McGuire, 1970? – folk quite liked World’s End.

Thirsk local historian and author Corbett Harding confirms that a pub of that name opened on the site in 1855, run by a family called Dodsworth. It closed in 1911.

“It was on an old pack horse trail but at the time it’s all there was there. The river had no bridge and no ford. However jokingly, people may well have supposed it the end of the world.”

Mr Harding wrote the Thirsk and Sowerby book in the Amberley series Britain Through Time. It’s still available.

BENEATH a Grade II-listed pack horse bridge, Cod Beck meanders past World’s End – clearly curious, too, since precious few cod may have been caught in freshwater streams.

“I saw an otter there once, and caught many a good trout on the fly, but the cod proved elusive,” says Keith, now in Auckland Park – “a little oasis” – near Bishop Auckland.

The Internet suggests, Mr Harding agrees, that it is likely to be a corruption of cold beck, chilly because of the steep banks through which it flows from Osmotherley to the Swale at Topcliffe.

“There’s a suggestion of a Welsh woodland connection, as in Betwsy- Coed, but I think it can be discarded,”

says Mr Harding.

It’s been home, he says, to shoals of lampreys, those eel-like creatures that sucker onto stones. “You could fish all day,” says Mr Harding, “but I doubt if you’d catch a cod.”

WHEN he lived down south – “back in the dark ages” – Jon Glen knew a lady from the village of Ugley, near Stansted in Essex. “There must have been an Ugley Women’s Institute,” he supposes.

The name, it’s reckoned, simply means “the woodland clearance of a man named Ugga.”

Alongside North Piddle, Pratt’s Bottom, Titty Ho and several that cannot be mentioned, even in a column as silly as this one, Ugley also features in Rude Britain, sub-titled “The 100 rudest place names”.

There appears not to be an Ugley Women’s Institute though there’s certainly a St Peter’s church. The Ugley Mothers’ Union no doubt puts a brave face on it.

IT’S Bill Bartle in Barnard Castle who was brought up near Jump, a village outside Barnsley, said – however spuriously – to owe its name to the only way of getting across the local stream.

“Allegedly, the sign saying ‘Jump, 1 mile’ was always being stolen,”

says Bill.

It’s Chris Mills in Butterknowle, west Durham – Butterknowle Slack, to be precise, by which must hang another tale – who returns us to Plucks Gutter, also mentioned last week.

“It’s a term for a drainage ditch that’s also navigable by boats, in this case joining the River Stour to the east Kent marshes,” says Chris.

The Gutter press moves on.

MAURICE Heslop was driving his daughter, Julie, down to Bath University when they spotted a signpost to Darlingscott off the A429.

“Since Julie had just started going out with a young man called Scott Foster, we stopped and took a photograph,”

says Maurice, from Billingham.

The photograph may be better of the sign than it is of Julie, he supposes, but it’s still by no means out of place. She and darling Scott married and live happy ever after.

HANG on a minute, what of Linger and Die? “I’ve just found out that one of my distant relations was born there,”

writes Billy Mollon, from Durham.

The Internet offers a 1937 cutting from (of all things) the Kent Evening Post. “Durham has many curiously named villages, which include No Place and Pity Me, but the strangest of all is Linger and Die, a small village of 30 residents near Ferryhill Station.”

Much more recently, a 2006 media release from the RMT union complained that railway track workers were being showered with human excrement from passing Class 91 Mallard trains on a bend at Linger and Die bridge, Ferryhill.

“It was only when they tasted the effluent for themselves that GNER admitted there was a problem,” said RMT general secretary Bob Crow.

It would be a pretty horrible way to go, and before we go much further, does anyone – that redoubtable former polliss Mr Ray Gibbon, perhaps?

– know any more of Linger and Die?

YET more byways, a note from Darlington Scrabble Club secretary Geoff Howe. “As you can imagine we talk about a wide range of subjects.

Any time that we don’t know the answer to something, it’s suggested that we ask you.”

Firstly, says Geoff, he was returning by bus from Durham when he overheard two old chaps talking about going through Fatty Man Squeeze to get to the Lily Laundry.

A mishearing? The former Lily Laundry at Nevilles Cross? Readers may be able to come clean.

The Scrabble Club treasurer, meanwhile, wonders about the name Hell’s Kettles, those three sink holes a couple of miles south of Darlington where people and animals where allegedly drowned or eaten alive by pikes and eels.

Geoff finally asks about monkeys’ blood, the stuff that once (and may still) cheer up ice cream. “Dare I suggest it has something to do with Hartlepool?” he asks. Probably it would be wise not to.

MOTHER Shipton was a Knaresborough lass, of course, born Ursula Southeil in 1488 and said to be conspicuously ugly. (See under “Essex”, above.) The best known prophecy attributed to her wasn’t published until 1641: Carriages without horses shall go, And accidents fill the world with woe, Around the world thoughts shall fly In the twinkling of an eye.

Though it almost certainly wasn’t she who wrote it, whoever did could have made a fortune on the racecourse.

Iron in the water shall float, As easily as a wooden boat… MANY others have put a date on the end of the world, not least at the end of 1999. Though once or twice it’s seemed quite close, not least at the Emirates Stadium last Saturday, we seem thus far to have got away with it.

There’s a fair bit of doom mongering about the year 2012. Since there’s little before that, however, the column confidently expects to return next week.