wiki-illiam #109: q8

[dubdobdee]

8. In a descriptive handbook, published 150 years ago, to what places were the following words applied:

i: "It is the largest piece of artificial water in the kingdom"?
ii: "… employed in the salmon and eel fisheries, and manufacture of paper, soap, candles and leather"?
iii: "… several important mines … producing tin, copper, nickel, with clay, and china stone for the Staffordshire potteries"?
iv: "Excellent bacon and hams are cured here, and vast numbers of small cattle pass this way to be fattened for market in Norfolk and Essex"?
v: "A bath-house has been built over some valuable springs which rise from the pits, and are very beneficial in cases of scrofula and similar complaints"?
vi: "… one mass of dilapidation and filth; the old crumbling houses being used by the poor wherever they can find something like a roof to cover them"?
vii: "… by day it will be found dirty and irregularly built, without order or management, decent roads or footpaths, no supply of water"?
viii: "… there are no roadside inns worth the name; the ale is wretched stuff, and it is safest to take provisions with you on an excursion"?
ix: "… formerly noted for wire works, but now a seat of the linen trade, especially diapers, drills, ducks, ticks etc"?
x: "No particular manufacture, but celebrated for its cakes and brawn"?

Bradshaw: completed

All from Bradshaw, all read out from same by twitter-user petra-jane: all answers tidily written out below

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Easy if you have the book; quite difficult otherwise. I am in the dark.

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

Ah, I like the ones with scope for guesswork....

iii. (Somewhere in) Cornwall? That was metal-mining central in those days.
vi. and vii. somewhere in the Auld Country? Sounds like An Beal Bocht....

[petra jane (from livejournal.com)]

I HAVE THE BOOK! I bought it in my "wouldn't it be amusing to tour England using Victorian maps and guidebooks for some reason" phase a few weeks before the holiday. Does consulting the Book In Question count as looking up the answers?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i: Post those you know w/o looking them up today (if any)
ii: free for all (prob easily won by ppl in NZ who get up early)

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

I strongly suspect the book is Bradshaw's; if so, viewers of Michael Portillo's recent TV series might also be able to give it a go.

For my part, I can only make reasonable guesses at two of them:

iii sounds like northern Cornwall - perhaps Redruth?
iv sounds strongly like Newmarket.

When we tried solving this round on 27 December, abigailb and swaldman had some further suggestions, which I'll try to dig out when I get home.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

We were thinking i was a dock and x might be Eccles.

[friedslice.livejournal.com]

I was thinking Bradshaw's as well. I have a copy but I'm nowhere near it right now.

[petra jane (from livejournal.com)]

And yes, these are indeed the nervous and terse descriptions (to quote one Sherlock Holmes) from the first edition (1863) of Bradshaw's Descriptive Railway Handbook.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

I suspect Holmes and Watson were thinking of the more utilitarian Bradshaw's Monthly Railway Guide, a publication which I dearly wish still existed.

[petra jane (from livejournal.com)]

Per Bradshaw's Descriptive Railway Handbook, 1863 edition:

i. Virginia Water, a "beautiful lake, situated in Windsor Forest"
ii. Coleraine, a "large and handsome" town in N. Ireland.
iii. St Austell, Cornwall. The then-recently-established brewery doesn't rate a mention, but the recently-abolished rotten borough of Grampound does.
iv. Dumfries, Scotland, famed for its pork products and for quartering the Young Pretender in 1745
v. Ashby-de-la-Zouch, near Burton-upon-Trent (no wonder those springs were so valuable, think of all the tasty ale they could've made)
vi. King's Island, Limerick's Viking-era Old Town. Limerick New Town (then less than a century old) "has some good streets and squares"
vii. Merthyr, South Wales. Best visited at night, when the blast furnaces are beautifully lit up, but by day there are no worthwhile attractions save the newly-built poor-house.
viii. The Isle of Man. Decent lodgings and "tolerably cheap" to stay there, but "a trip round the island, and another across it, to Peel, will embrace almost everything worth seeing".
ix. Barnsley, Yorkshire. Even by 1863, most of Barnsley's weavers worked at home rather than the great industrial mills that dominated the other side of the Pennines. Diaper, drill, duck and tick are all weaves of fabric, by the way.
x. Shrewsbury in the Midlands was celebrated for is brawn and bikkies.