England, I die pronouncing it

Why are British place names so baffling?

With half-term approaching, we’re hoping to visit one of our favourite parts of the world - the border area with Wales which today goes by the bland and insipid ‘the West Midlands’ but which I insist on calling Mercia in the hope that it will catch on (it won’t).

We’ve stayed in the Herefordshire-Shropshire-Worcestershire region a number of times, drawn to its rolling landscapes, the friendliness of locals, the large supply of old houses in which you will repeatedly bump your head, and the soft power of J.R.R. Tolkien.

As with any visit to the provinces, one of the things that marks us as out-of-towners is our failure to pass the local shibboleths, and it wasn’t until my third visit that I realised that nearby Leominster was pronounced - for some reason - Lemster.