Even Greener Pastures

Puncknowle? That's only the start of it, Mr Dini.   How would you pronounce Worcester, Leicester and Gloucester, for example?

Britain is stuffed full of places with idiosyncratic pronunciations.  Here are some more:



and here's a video:

Or how about Harwich?  That`s sure not pronounced like it is spelled. When I took Laker to Gatwick back in 1980, (good old Freddie Laker) I had to take the train up to Harwich for the Harwich to Hoek van Holland ship (I think that ship journey took all night) so I learned not to trust British spellings of place names. I have ancestors I traced to Southwark, London (I also wondered what was going on in Southwark area) and that place is no pronounced like it`s spelled, and my DNA test came out in right-on-the-money saying I had British ancestors from the greater London area. That squared perfectly with own genealogy. The even got it down to the cities:  Glasgow City (also confirmed by my own records from 20 years ago, greater Manchester, Merseyside (no idea where that is), Edinburgh, Tyne and Wear (again, no clue where that is) Belfast, Lancashire, County Durham (no idea what that is) and West Midlands (another unknown location in Britain).

But if you go south of London, like to Eastbourne or that area the place names are easy to pronounce.