An Irishman's Diary

THE fiddle-player Martin Hayes tells a funny story about how he first learned the importance of a strong Clare accent. He was born near the village of Feakle - pronounced locally, at least by the older people, as "Fay-kel". But like many of his generation, he went through a rebellious phase in which he insisted on saying the name "properly".

Then he started touring overseas and discovered that, especially in the US, audiences were amused to learn that he apparently came from a place called "Faecal" (or "fecal" as they spell it there). Thus did he finally learn to appreciate the phonetic wisdom of his ancestors.

In Ireland, we are probably more familiar with the village than with the adjective for bodily waste, so Feakle is not Ireland's most embarrassing place-name. The Limerick parish of Effin still heads any shortlist for that title, despite deriving from the name of a local saint (Eibhin), whose only consolation must be that it is at least a polite version of the Anglo-Saxon expletive (to which we will return).

Resident are quite proud of the name, I'm told, although it must be a gift to the parish's critics. A local wouldn't have to do much wrong on a football field, for example, to be dismissed as an "Effin eejit". Indeed, the late Scottish folk-singer Matt McGinn once explored the name's full comic potential in an epic about an apiarist who comes to a sad end.

Here's the opening verse: "He kept bees in the auld toon of Effin, An Effin beekeeper was he; And one day this Effin beekeeper, Was stung by a big Effin bee." Not far from Effin, incidentally, is the hillside village of Nicker, where some years ago I spent an afternoon covering a Labour party canvass during the East Limerick by-election campaign.

On the edge of the Golden Vale, this was not a socialist heartland. And I remember spending three-quarters of an hour trying to devise an intro to a colour piece on the theme of Labour's hope that, in a by-election, Nicker's voting patterns might be more elastic than usual. I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to residents.

Then, of course, there is the village name that occurs both in Cavan and Donegal. In fact, when the London Independent did a piece on risqué place-names in these islands a while back, the Donegal seaside village of Muff was the only Irish example to make the list; the writer was clearly delighted to discover that, yes, there really was a Muff Diving Club.

It is perhaps just as well that the Independent had not heard of the Cavan village that for centuries has held an annual "Fair of Muff". Otherwise the place might now be attracting the wrong kind of tourists.

Like most of the others, Muff is an innocent victim of mistaken linguistic identity. As the Irish "Magh", it means only "plain". Similarly traduced was the Meath village of Nobber, which was minding its own business - literally - as "An Obair" before anglicisation condemned locals to a life as Nobberigines.

England has no such excuse, yet it is full of place-names that cause locals to mumble when asked where they live. There are a quite a few "Bottoms" in the English gazetteer - of which Pratts Bottom in Kent may be the prize example - and no shortage of "Ends" either. Of the latter, the place you'd least like to be from is probably a toss-up between Nob End (near Bolton) and Lickey End, a beauty spot in Worcestershire.

I'm not sure why Wetwang, a village in Yorkshire, sounds so funny, but it does. By contrast, the problems of living in the Essex village of Ugley are best appreciated in the names of local organisations. The Ugley Farmers' Market struggles on to this day. But vanity eventually got the better of the Ugley Women's Institute, which

is now known as the Women's Institute of Ugley.

Speaking of "faecal", pity the picturesque Dorset village of Shitterton, named after the all-too-literal River Shiter, formerly used as a public toilet. Some locals remain perversely proud of the name; others now quietly drop their aitches to make it "Sitterton". Poignantly, the sites using this cleaned-up version include the local sewage pumping station.

The US is full of embarrassing place-names: from Hell (in Michigan) to Fishkill, a village in upstate New York that gets its suffix from the old Dutch word for "creek". One of the more intriguingly titled places is French Lick, Indiana, home of basketball legend Larry Bird. It's a moot point as to where in France this should be twinned with; although my suggestion, to be on the safe side, is the Languedoc town of Condom.

Condom's road-signs have been a magnet for visitors down the years. But its problems are nothing compared with those of a certain Austrian village with which Effin surely must be twinned sooner or later. Its name is pronounced differently in German, but this is no consolation to the unfortunate residents of Fucking, whose proximity to Salzburg guarantees it a constant stream of English-speaking tourists.

In 2004, villagers considered changing the name that had stood for 900 years, before voting to retain it. But the Fucking mayor had had enough of his signs being stolen. A year later, he ordered new ones, welded to steel posts and embedded in concrete. Since when, at least, attempts to take the town's name have been in vain.

fmcnally@irish-times.ie