From Smelly Bay to Sausage Island, native nicknames for UK landmarks have lengthy been a supply of amusement. However in an emergency, the very last thing rescuers must grapple with is find out how to discover Loopy Mary’s Gap.
Fortuitously Ordnance Survey (OS) has added hundreds of those unofficial names for cliffs, caves, sandbanks, coastal carparks and buildings to a database for the emergency providers.
The OS Vernacular Names Device (VNT) incorporates the nicknames of greater than 9,000 places throughout the UK, lots of which have been created and handed on by native folks.
Smelly Bay refers to Pentire on the north Cornwall coast, Sausage Island is a well-liked rock for leaping off on the coast of north-west Wales, whereas Loopy Mary’s Gap is a deep ravine in Pakefield, Suffolk, mentioned to be haunted by the ghost of a girl whose husband was misplaced at sea.
Different places on the listing embody Jabba the hut, a curvaceous and vibrant seaside hut in Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, the Ingesting Dinosaur, a rock formation at Flamborough Head in East Yorkshire, which resembles a diplodocus ingesting from the ocean, and Teletubby Hill, a woodland space in Burry Port in Wales.
The VNT is a alternative for Fintan, an OS mapping device created greater than 10 years in the past for HM Coastguard, which allowed customers to add the native title for a coastal function to the database with the correct location for its current geographic title.
It was developed to make sure that coastguard responders might get to emergencies extra shortly, permitting control-room employees to generate a exact location by merely typing in a nickname.
The Welsh ambulance service is a brand new consumer of the vernacular device. Chris Jones, an emergency medical service administrator, mentioned it’s “actually helpful and really straightforward to make use of”.
“We need to log as many vernacular names as we are able to so are exploring how the management room can do this now in addition to beginning to embody this in control-room induction coaching,” mentioned Jones.
“The true worth long term will likely be making certain that our ambulances will have the ability to get to the scene of an incident successfully with an correct location offered by OS, irrespective of how it’s recognized by a caller.”
A coastguard rescue crew used the unique Fintan device to discover a spot on a seaside recognized colloquially because the Tiki Head in Gwynedd in Wales the place a caller had fallen and injured their leg.
In one other incident, a coastguard search and rescue helicopter positioned a lacking particular person utilizing the nickname the Enjoyable Ship, which refers to a spot at Mostyn Docks on the River Dee.
Throughout a current go to to the OS headquarters in Southampton, Princess Anne added “the marriage cake” to the database, which is another title for the Queen Victoria memorial reverse Buckingham Palace.
John Kimmance, the managing director of OS nationwide mapping providers, mentioned: “Wherever we dwell, all of us have nicknames for native locations – and importing these right into a database actually might imply the distinction between life and loss of life on an emergency name – notably for providers referred to as from outdoors their regional areas.”