I was on my way to a meeting and already running behind schedule which prevented me from satisfying my curiosity.
This will have involved finding a safe place to turn off the min road, park up and then walk back along the rough grass verge to the place where the wooden directional road sign stood. I made a promise to myself to do what was necessary on the return leg of my journey later on in the day. The memory of what I had seen did cause me to chuckle a bit in between the otherwise intense and serious purpose of the day's conference in the nearest large town.
The name on the finger-like pointed sign was evidently for a small village, perhaps not even that, a hamlet or just a cluster of farm workers cottages.
I had never come across the name before and to my encyclopaedic knowledge of funny or rude sounding place names this was a completely new one. SEXHOW.
It was now firmly number one on my list. Wetwang had at last been relegated from a position it had held for decades.
My fascination for ribald and lewd signposts really started with the The Book of Liff, a slim black covered publication by Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide fame and John Lloyd, himself not too shabby a writer and comedy guru which came out in 1983.
I was twenty at the time and in full time education as a student so anything vaguely funny and anarchic appealed. The book was described at its launch as "a dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet" which immediately excited my interest.
Rather than inventing new words, Adams and Lloyd picked a number of existing place-names and assigned interesting meanings to them that can be regarded as on the verge of social existence and are ready to become recognisable entities.
My home town of Hull took on the descriptive form of "the smell of a damp weekend holiday cottage" and the village of Huby, near York "A half-erection large enough to be a publicly embarrassing bulge in the trousers, but not large enough to be of any use to anybody"
Other examples are Shoeburyness "The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat that is still warm from somebody else's bottom" and Plymouth "To relate an amusing story to someone without remembering that it was they who told it to you in the first place".
It was a real source of entertainment on long bus or train rides to and from college and frequent outbursts of laughter from its pages made sure that I always had a seat to myself.
Douglas Adams attributes the book to the same idea used by the English humourist Paul Jennings in an article Ware, Wye, Watford, published in the late 1950s.
The diversity of origin and heritage of the UK makes for some quite unique place names in their own right, over and above the interpretation in that little black pocket book. I would recommend anyone with a sense of fun and mischief to search it out for themselves or as a gift for other like minded idiots.
Sexhow is just too blatant to require any embellishment although its distance from the main road, as depicted in a single number on the sign did summon up images of one of those manuals found high up on many domestic bookcases, under the bed or in the bottom of the wardrobe, Sexhow 2.
My meeting dragged on well into the winter afternoon and by the time I was back on the road and trying to locate the road sign in semi darkness I had missed the opportunity to take that all important photograph for dissemination to my public audience.
It was a matter of doing a little bit of research about the place. I expected a few statistics like; Population 10 now but double by tomorrow or just recorded as 69, you know the usual jokes. In fact whatever lay two miles down that lane was a complete and utter surprise as the following story testifies to;
The Worm Of Sexhow
The Worm of Sexhow, according to ‘Yorkshire Legends and Traditions’ by Rev
Thomas Parkinson (1888):
’Sexhow is a small hamlet or township in the parish of Rudby, some four miles from the town of Stokesley, in Cleveland.
Upon a round knoll at this place a most pestilent dragon, or worm, took up its abode; whence it came, or what was its origin, no one knew. So voracious was its appetite that it took the milk of nine cows daily to satisfy its cravings; but we have not heard that it required any other kind of food.
When not sufficiently fed, the hissing noise it made alarmed all the country round about; and, worse than that, its breath was so strong as to be absolutely poisonous, and those who breathed it died. This state of things was unbearable, and the country was becoming rapidly depopulated. At length the monster's day of doom dawned. A knight, clad in complete armour, passed that way, whose name or country no one knew, and, after a hard fight, he slew the monster, and left it dead upon the hill, and then passed on his way. He came, he fought, he won; and then he went away. The inhabitants of the hamlet of Sexhow took the skin of the monster-worm and suspended it in the church, over the pew belonging to the hamlet of Sexhow, where it long remained a trophy of the knight's victory, and of their own deliverance from the terrible monster.'
It has been suggested that the skin may have been destroyed by Oliver Cromwell's troops following or during the English Civil War.
I had learned my lesson not to take place names for granted or on a literal basis. Next time, Bell End, Worcestershire, Brown Willy, Cornwall, Shitlingthorpe, Yorkshire and the combined efforts of Fanny Hill, Fanny Burn, Twathats and The Cock of Arran all in Scotland.
’Sexhow is a small hamlet or township in the parish of Rudby, some four miles from the town of Stokesley, in Cleveland.
Upon a round knoll at this place a most pestilent dragon, or worm, took up its abode; whence it came, or what was its origin, no one knew. So voracious was its appetite that it took the milk of nine cows daily to satisfy its cravings; but we have not heard that it required any other kind of food.
When not sufficiently fed, the hissing noise it made alarmed all the country round about; and, worse than that, its breath was so strong as to be absolutely poisonous, and those who breathed it died. This state of things was unbearable, and the country was becoming rapidly depopulated. At length the monster's day of doom dawned. A knight, clad in complete armour, passed that way, whose name or country no one knew, and, after a hard fight, he slew the monster, and left it dead upon the hill, and then passed on his way. He came, he fought, he won; and then he went away. The inhabitants of the hamlet of Sexhow took the skin of the monster-worm and suspended it in the church, over the pew belonging to the hamlet of Sexhow, where it long remained a trophy of the knight's victory, and of their own deliverance from the terrible monster.'
It has been suggested that the skin may have been destroyed by Oliver Cromwell's troops following or during the English Civil War.
I had learned my lesson not to take place names for granted or on a literal basis. Next time, Bell End, Worcestershire, Brown Willy, Cornwall, Shitlingthorpe, Yorkshire and the combined efforts of Fanny Hill, Fanny Burn, Twathats and The Cock of Arran all in Scotland.
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