This is a road sign just a few miles down the road on the way to Lincoln. It is the name of a town, not directions for use of local amenities, although the ‘please drive carefully’ works in either case, don’t you think? A little further along the road you get to Ownby by Spital, and then Normanby by Spital.
If that tickles you funny bone, as it does mine every time I pass by, beyond Lincoln on the road to London is the town of Lower Bottom. I understand that there is also a Middle Bottom and a Little Bottom close by. Cheek by jowl, as it were.
Last night on the ‘telly’ there was a news item of a local fair featuring a four mile horse race that has been run every year since 1519. At the same festival there was a cheese rolling contest, where teams take one metre diameter rounds of cheese and roll them down a hill. In order to keep them going the teams roll down the hill beside the cheese, and here was the newscaster doing a straight up account of the contest as all these cheeses and all the contestants tumbled over one another in a chaotic fall down a very steep hill. It was hilarious!
It is this combination of the very historic and the very silly – the sublime and the ridiculous, if you will – that gives England its charm: the pomp and circumstance of the longest monarchial dynasty on the planet, as well as the home of Peter Sellers, Monty Python and Mr. Bean.
Home Thoughts From Abroad 
March 21, 2009 at 8:51 am
Just for Steve’s benefit. There is pleasure in making others laugh, but I think the locals would also want you to know that the word Spital derives from the word Hospitaller. As back in the middle ages and such there was a place established to give the weary traveller a refuge stop on his long journey to wherever he was going. The Hospitality involved beer to drink, as the water would be unsafe, but also as in the word Hospital there was first aid to give or whatever else a traveller may require to help him on his way. This establishment has been there ever since. Though these day they run it on a commercial basis.
March 22, 2009 at 10:18 am
I stand corrected, and delighted to have your insight into local signage. Now, what do you make of Little Bottom?
For future reference – and I do hope there will be one – comments are not immediately uploaded so that we can edit out any comments that may be inappropriate or offensive to our host country’s majority religious group. Just a precaution.