From Stinky Bay to Sausage Island, local nicknames for UK landmarks have long been a source of amusement. But in an emergency, the last thing rescuers need to grapple with is how to find Crazy Mary’s Hole.
Fortunately Ordnance Survey (OS) has added thousands of these unofficial names for cliffs, caves, sandbanks, coastal car parks and buildings to a database for the emergency services.
The OS Vernacular Names Tool (VNT) contains the nicknames of more than 9,000 locations across the UK, many of which were created and passed on by local people.
Stinky Bay refers to Pentire on the north Cornwall coast, Sausage Island is a popular rock for jumping off on the coast of north-west Wales, while Crazy Mary’s Hole is a deep ravine in Pakefield, Suffolk, said to be haunted by the ghost of a woman whose husband was lost at sea.
Other locations on the list include Jabba the hut, a curvaceous and colourful beach hut in Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, the Drinking Dinosaur, a rock formation at Flamborough Head in East Yorkshire, which resembles a diplodocus drinking from the sea, and Teletubby Hill, a woodland area in Burry Port in Wales.
The VNT is a replacement for Fintan, an OS mapping tool created more than 10 years ago for HM Coastguard, which allowed users to upload the local name for a coastal feature to the database with the accurate location for its existing geographical name.
It was developed to ensure that coastguard responders could get to emergencies more quickly, allowing control-room staff to generate a precise location by simply typing in a nickname.
The Welsh ambulance service is a new user of the vernacular tool. Chris Jones, an emergency medical service administrator, said it was “really useful and very easy to use”.
“We want to log as many vernacular names as we can so are exploring how the control room can do that now as well as starting to include this in control-room induction training,” said Jones.
“The real value longer term will be ensuring that our ambulances will be able to get to the scene of an incident effectively with an accurate location provided by OS, no matter how it is identified by a caller.”
A coastguard rescue team used the original Fintan tool to find a spot on a beach known colloquially as the Tiki Head in Gwynedd in Wales where a caller had fallen and injured their leg.
In another incident, a coastguard search and rescue helicopter located a missing person using the nickname the Fun Ship, which refers to a spot at Mostyn docks on the River Dee.
During a recent visit to the OS headquarters in Southampton, Princess Anne added “the wedding cake” to the database, which is an alternative name for the Queen Victoria memorial opposite Buckingham Palace.
John Kimmance, the managing director of OS national mapping services, said: “Wherever we live, we all have nicknames for local places and uploading these into a database really could mean the difference between life and death on an emergency call, particularly for services called from outside their regional areas.”
