Nuncle Dicks to Crazy Mary's Hole: how these names could save your life
Nuncle Dicks, Portland, is just one of the many local nicknames being used by the Ordnance Survey maps to make the coast safe.
Nuncle Dicks, Crazy Mary's Hole, and Stinky Bay; saying any of these names to a coastguard might land you in a spot of trouble.
Local nicknames and colloquialisms present emergency services with an issue when they're racing against the clock to save your life.
But a new mapping tool called FINTAN is being launched nationally by the Ordnance Survey to make sure coastguards know exactly where you are.
Using this easy-to-use tool the rescue service can reference nearly 500,000 coastal place names, which includes 7,500 local nicknames and alternative names of landmarks along the coast of Great Britain.
Some of the nicknames are naturally quite humourous. They include:
Nuncle Dicks (Portland)
Hallelujah Bay (Portland)
Toe End (Caravan Parks near Selsey)
The Comedy Carpet (Lancashire)
Slippery Bottom (Norfolk)
Chris Chambers is the head of National Mapping Services for OS. He told Greatest Hits Radio:
"It's absolutely a laugh we have but at those times when someone has fallen at Nuncle Dicks, it really, really serious at that point and it really needs the Maritime Coastguard Agency to respond to them as quickly as possible.
"When push comes to shove it's great that we can work with the Maritime Coastguard Agency to get them there as quickly as possible."
In 2020, the MCA was called to over 33,000 incidents around the coast of Great Britain and confusion over the location names given by emergency callers can cause critical delays in the rescue teams getting to the right location.
The project began with a pilot on the south coast with MCA staff entering nicknames for offshore rocks and islands against maps.
It has now developed into a national system allowing MCA to quickly identify locations in an emergency. From only having a rough idea of location and needing to search the map to confirm the right place, staff can now simply type in the location nickname in FINTAN and be told where it is.
Chief Coastguard Pete Mizen said:
“We are here to save lives and our biggest priority is reaching people in need of our help as quickly as possible. A great deal of hard work has gone into the creation of the FINTAN database, which delivers so much local knowledge and there is no doubt that having this extra information at our fingertips cuts down our response times and saves lives.
"We are expecting another busy summer at the coast with many families and water sports enthusiasts enjoying holidays in the UK this year and this database will no doubt yet again prove invaluable to us.”