LITTORALLY delightful, yesterday's Eating Owt column recorded the pleasures of a walk along the Durham Coastal path from Crimdon Dene to Horden, the shoreline much transformed.

That down there, said a dog walking local, was Horden Blast Beach - and started a debate about how blast beaches, renowned for their fishing, came by their name.

The Oxford English Dictionary washes its hands of them, though ranging from blast bob ("the stroke of a blast of wind") to blast bomb and blast hole.

Bill Griffiths, that great guardian of Durham dialect, is more forthcoming. Listing the beaches along the Durham coast - Bessy's Hole, Noses Point, Chemical Beach - he advances two theories for blast beach, like the one up the coast at Dawdon.

Either, says Bill, there was once a blast furnace on the cliff top or, possibly, it's a corruption of ballast beach.

Either way, Durham's beaches are coal scarred no longer. Truly a blast from the past.

IT was in the same coastal connection that yesterday's column caused confusion with a reference to "nelly denes".

The denes, of course, were the generally wooded inlets between Sunderland and Hartlepool - eight in all, they reckon - which for walkers necessitate a serious, if scenic, detour.

Nellie Dean was familiar in old time music hall, perhaps our best known drinking song. (Strictly speaking, it wasn't a drinking song but a drunken song.)

We were reminded of it while waiting for the last bus home on Friday, an elderly gentleman in sackless search of the number 28 launching unchained into melodies like "I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside" and "It's a Long Way to Tipperary".

It was only when he turned his tuneless attention to "Take Me Back To Dear Old Richmond" that we realised he'd probably had enough.

CHARLES II, whose dying words are said to have been "Let not poor Nellie starve", is principally blamed for the flippancy with which that name is now regarded. A no Gwynne situation, as it were.

That adventurous Eskimo lass, all 67 verses of her, can't have helped, either. As one of the websites inarguably asks, can you imagine Escoffier creating peach Nellie?

One account of Nellie Dean's origins, with thanks as ever to the assiduous John Briggs, is that the song was written by a group of Boer war troops billeted in a mill - now an office block - at Lemsford, near St Alban's.

There's an old mill by the stream, Nellie Dean; Where I used to sit and dream, Nellie Dean...

The curious thing, however, is that Ellen (otherwise Nellie) Dean was also the narrator of Wuthering Heights - "a sensible, intelligent and commanding woman." Might they have been singing of her?

Do any readers still bear that put upon forename, or is this yet another case of Not on your Nellie?

GARDENERS' World on the BBC last Friday night talked of the rare plant Darlingtonia Californica. Intrigued by the name, former Shildon lad John Chandler - now training in Essex for the Anglican priesthood - decided to do a bit more digging.

John reads the column on the Internet - "vicariously", he says, as a future Church of England minister well might.

Darlingtonia, at any rate, is a pretty nasty piece of work. It eats insects for its supper (and just about every other time of the day, an' all).

Thriving at 5,000 feet, rooted in peat bogs, it is also known as cobra lily "for its fanciful resemblance to the hooded serpent".

Not so fanciful. Having attracted the poor insect, the duplicitous Darlingtonia then lures it down a sort of botanical one way street to its death, where it lies at the bottom with its mates, putrefying.

"I cannot envisage that the plant has any resemblance to a Darlingtonian," says John, "save that it is carnivorous, likes warm weather, thrives in clarts and can endure a snow-bound winter."

The name's origins still eluded him, however. Mr Briggs blossomed once again.

The wretched thing is called, not after County Durham's biggest town, but after Dr William Darlington, an American botanist, physician and Congressman who lived from 1782-1863.

Botanically it is a pitcher plant, an 18 acre reserve in Oregon devoted entirely to its cultivation. Sadly its looks are deceptive: as someone probably remarked once before, every pitcher tells a story.

THE Rev Christopher Wardale, Vicar of Holy Trinity in Darlington, marked 25 years in the Anglican priesthood with a happy celebration service last Thursday.

Among those present was long serving Darlington councillor Dorothy Long, whose many claims to eternal glory include that it was she, umpteen years ago, who first sent the column hurtling headlong down Apostrophe Avenue.

She'd been invited to a meeting of something called the Citizen's Panel, she recalled, and publicly wondered if citizenship might be so singular an attribute.

Though the Avenue is now thoroughly well trodden, Dot promises to remain on neighbourhood watch.

As for Chris Wardale, and the reasons why his ministry has been so remarkable, more not in this week's At Your Service but in the following Saturday's.

ST Augustine's Roman Catholic church in Darlington is bigger yet, overflowing nonetheless for Roderick Burtt's funeral on Monday.

Councillor and cricket nut, Rotarian and raconteur, estate agent and enthusiastic entertainer, the wonderful Roderick may best be remembered hereabouts for his 35 year engagement to the splendid Judith Kent.

Though they finally married a year ago, after his last illness was diagnosed, Rod's dilly dalliance drew an allusion in an engrossing and wholly affectionate eulogy from his old pal Michael Thorpe.

They'd been friends, said Michael, since even before Roderick and Judith became engaged. "That's how long ago it was."

Michael also repeated one of Rod's favourite after dinner stories, perhaps the most risqu joke we've ever heard in church, about the incontinence sufferer who calls his GP for advice.

"Where are you ringing from?" asks the doctor.

"Why," says the poor chap, "from the waist downwards."

...and finally, proof that if God may not be female, her representative on earth certainly is.

The story concerns a senior Durham diocesan clergyman who, one evening last week, attended a lengthy meeting followed (as the best meetings often are) by a decent drink with which to drown it.

In this case, it was a potent eastern European spirit called Grappa, or some such.

The reverend gentleman arrived back at the vicarage some time after midnight, only to discover that he'd lost his front door key.

Afraid lest all hell be let loose to disturb Her Above, he texted his sleeping wife a message and then arranged a bed with a friend. "It was either that or the front doorstep," he says.

Truly, as Mr John Knox observed in 1588, the first blast of the trumpet will be against the monstrous regiment of women. On the beaches of County Durham, they've probably been echoing it ever since.

Published: 06/07/2005