I recently discovered, to my deep satisfaction, that there is a village in Yorkshire, England, called Thornton-le-Beans. Elsewhere in Britain you can find a Nether Wallop, a Great Snoring, a Chew Magna, a Leatherhead, a Stoke Poges, a Much Hadham, and an Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

It has always seemed to me that the British have a certain wayward genius when it comes to proper nouns. You have only to walk down any High Street looking at he names on pub signs (the Flying Spoon, the Frog and Nightgown, the Crab and Gumboil) or run an eye over the columns of the British edition of Who’s Who (wherein you will find such noteworthies as Sir Dingle Foot, Lard Fraser of Tullybelton and Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykenham-Fiennas) to realize that they have a rare instinct for appending notable monikers to everyday objects.

Take almost any area of nomenclature, from the names of the positions in the game of cricket (short leg, silly mid-on) to the common appellations of English wildflowers (toadflax, lady’s bedstraw, blue fleabane), to street names in a place like York (Coffee Yard, Pope’s Head Alley, Mad Alice Lane), to the names of London churches (St. Giles Cripplegate, St. Sepulchre Without Newgate, and my own favorite, St. Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe), and you can see in an instant that we are dealing here with a breed apart, a race of people who are at once instinctively poetic and resplendently dotty.

Nowhere do the British combine these twin strains of poetry and dottiness more gloriously than in the names of their towns and villages. I could spend hours—I have spent hours—sitting at the kitchen table with a large Ordnance Survey map spread before me, just savoring the wonderful, resonant names scattered over the countryside. There are some 30,000 place-names in Great Britain and a good half of them, I would guess, are notable or arresting in some way.

Some are quietly evocative, the names summoning forth images of tidy cottages and a steepled church clustered around a village green or lazing beside a river: Saffron Walden, Winterbourne Abbas, Weston Lullingields, Theddlethorpe All Saints, Little Missenden, Lyme Regis, Chalfont St. Peter. Others are more intriguing, as if their names hide some ancient, possibly dark, secret: Husbands Bosworth, Gravesend, Ryme Intrinseca, Great Steeping, White Ladies Aston.

A surprising number sound like the characters in a bad period novel: Sampford Peverell, Stockleigh Pomeroy, Dawlish Warren, Stanstead Mountfitchet. A number sound alarmingly like skin complaints: Whiterashes, Scurlage, Sockburn, Scableuch. Some are almost unbearably quaint: Bottom o’ the moor, Brightwall-cum-Scotwell, Saxlingham Nethergate, Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh.

But the best are just dazzlingly and adorably daffy: Wigtwizzle, Meathop, Wigglesworth, Giggleswick, Mousehole, Pease Cottage, Prittlewell, Weston-under-lizard, Mid Thundergay, Blubberhouses, St. Dogmaels, Spittal of Glenshee, and Titsey. There are so many of this last type that you would almost think there must be a Ministry of Silly Names in London imposing them by fiat.