Where's That Then? No 37

I only discovered this sublime place a couple of weeks ago. Yet another thing I love about England- you never know what's around the next corner. A bit like Northern Ireland, when I drove round a bend and found an old man worse for drink lying in the middle of the road in the pouring rain. Passing motorists negotiated me trying to pick him up so that I could lay him over a fence like an old carpet waiting to be beaten, both of us clutching each other in a ghastly dance. Anyway, how about this? Impossibly English, it must have been used as a period film location.

Watch Out!

This sign appears just before a bend in the village of Cottingham in Northamptonshire. From what I could see it's not a particularly dangerous bend (there are far worse ones round here without any warning), and I could only think that maybe something horrendous had happened here that still reveberates in the local community. The reason I show it is that it was such a refreshing change to see an actual word writ large on a road sign that wasn't flashing digitally or pretending I didn't know a word of English. The letter style and colour reminded me of something British Railways might have put up in a goods yard to stop you walking round the back of a Scammell parcels truck, and of course that irrisistible combination certainly stopped me in my tracks. It also brought to mind a lane in Upper Brailles in Warwickshire, called, in cast-iron: 'Caution Corner'. It was bemusingly next to a funeral director's, and when I put it in my record of such things- Pastoral Peculiars- Richard Mabey said in his preface: " ...a litany of place names captures the bizarre, heartening chaos of it all. Caution Corner! What happened there?". Perhaps this sign was erected by local residents (there's something non-Ministry of Transport about it) but it's a well-executed one, and so much better than a speed bump or a tawdry flourescent poster metaphorically waving a parish clerk's finger at you. And I love the ivy climbing up the pole.