LIKE West Cornforth, forever Doggy, the Isle of Dogs is a bit of a mystery.

Some say that it's the area of east London where Henry VIII kept his hunting hounds, others - as one website discreetly puts it - suggest that the origins are "more dismissive."

Whichever tree it may be most appropriate to bark up, the column went unexpectedly to the Isle of Dogs last Wednesday.

Dominated by Canary Wharf, the area is now re-invented as Docklands. In at the deep end, we set off to walk back towards the city, headed in almost diametrically the wrong direction and were thus ecstatic to stumble in the middle of an urban nowhere across a railway station called Mudchute.

MUDCHUTE is on the Docklands Light Railway, opened by the Queen in 1987 and probably best known for being driverless. The initial cost was £77m, though the system has been much extended.

Many stations have names to savour: Herons Quay, Canada Water, Island Gardens, Gallions Reach and Royal Albert. Then there's Mudchute,

Millwall Docks, they reckon, were excavated in the 19th century with a mud chute, which may or may not be self-explanatory. Mudchute Farm is now Europe's largest urban farm. To disorientated foot sloggers it is also a blessed oasis, a haven to come to the aid of the clarty.

TEN British railway stations, other than Mudchute, which might make you want to stay on the train:

Hag Fold (Greater Manchester), Bare Lane (Morecambe), British Steel Redcar, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Swineshead (Lincolnshire), Looe (Cornwall), Grimsby Dock, Burnley Manchester Road, Wick, Wavertree Technology Park (Liverpool).

Ten British railway stations which suggest an unending transport of delight:

Flowery Field (Greater Manchester), Angel Road (East London), Rose Grove (Burnley!!!), Ash Vale (Hampshire), Leland Saltings (Cornwall), Gypsy Lane (Middlesbrough), Strawberry Hill (Twickenham), Sugar Loaf (mid-Wales), Bat and Ball (Kent), Shildon.

THE London Underground, otherwise the Tube, remains a source of still greater fascination - in operation since the Metropolitan Line opened in 1863.

There are 287 stations, only 29 south of the Thames and fewer than half subterranean. The 409 escalators travel the equivalent each week of twice around the world - Angel, with 319 steps, has the longest escalator in western Europe.

Among the greatest challenges is to visit every station in a day, the record presently held by John Welsby, a newspaper sub-editor from Nottingham.

"It's been a dream of mine since I was five," said John, thus confirming what some of us have long supposed about sub-editors.

He'd planned it for six months, declines to reveal his route for fear of dirty tricks down below, admits that he took off at Heathrow Airport at 5.04am and finished at Amersham nineteen hours, 18 minutes and 45 seconds later. He noted the number of each train and was photographed at every stop.

A Guinness Book of World Records spokeswoman said: "The skills needed are a mixture of detailed planning, athletic ability and sheer luck."

TEN other things you might never have known about the London Underground had we not made a Dog's dinner of the navigation:

* The only Tube stations which contain all five vowels are Mansion House and South Ealing.

* Northfields station on the Piccadilly Line was the first to use kestrels and hawks to kill the pigeons which nested there.

* William Ewart Gladstone and Dr Richard Beeching - whose infamous rail-roading report was published 40 years ago yesterday - are the only people to have had their coffins transported by Tube.

* Pigeons regularly travel from West Ham to central London in order to get more food.

* The temperature on the Underground is on average ten degrees Centigrade hotter than on the surface.

* Julian Lloyd Webber was the Underground's first official busker.

*An estimated half a million mice live on the Underground. Anthea Turner and her sister Wendy have written best-selling children's books about them.

* Only one person has been born in a Tube carriage - a little girl in 1924. She was christened Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor.

* Victoria and Kings Cross stations have the highest numbers of suicides. Victoria is the busiest station with 85 million passengers annually; Kings Cross has 70 million.

* A fragrance called Madeleine was introduced at St James Park, Euston and Piccadilly stations on March 23, 2001 in an attempt to make the system smell sweeter. It was withdrawn the following day after complaints that it made passengers feel sick.

Information from www.going-underground.net

THE new Whitaker's Almanac, meanwhile, reveals that the UK's busiest airport is Heathrow - yon end of the Piccadilly Line - with 60,764,924 passengers a year. The world's busiest is Atlanta.

The quietest appears to be Barrow-in-Furness, in Cumbria, with 54 passengers annually.

Since Barrow is awfully hard to reach by any means whatsoever, it is perhaps surprising that the airport averages just a single seated passenger each week.

Not even column stalwart John Briggs can glean much more information about it, though he suggests it should be named the Stan Laurel International Airport - the comedian having been born in those parts - and also recalls the Phileas Fogg commercials featuring Consett International Airport.

Wasn't there a chap with a bicycle pump blowing up the plane tyres, or something?

John also insists that Sunderland Airport once had regular commercial flights, though they never really took off. Nissan now occupies the site, where we expect for other reasons to land on Saturday. More, perhaps, ere long.

Baa humbug: the Yorkshire Dales National Park's logo

ACROSS the Pennines ourselves on Saturday, we note in the Westmorland Gazette further evidence of Britain's growing geographical mayhem - the same sort of thing which now puts Darlington in the Tees Valley.

This one's about a Swaledale Centre, though the £300,000 development is to be completely over the top - at Kirkby Stephen auction mart, in Cumbria.

The centre will focus on the sheep breed, notwithstanding that Swaledale is in North Yorkshire and that the logo of the Yorkshire Dales National park is a Swaledale ram's head.

Kate Braithwaite, one of the Cumbrians behind the idea, reckons that Kirkby Stephen is the "spiritual home" of the Swaledale sheep.

Over the border, however, they're less than baa humbug happy. "We feel a bit gazumped by this," says Maurice Hall, general manager of Hawes auction mart. "It is difficult to comment diplomatically."

IT is entirely in keeping with the column's sequential instinct that this brings us by the length and depth of the London Underground to where last week's Gadfly ended - the claggy bits of wool around a sheep's backside (and not just Swaledales, of course.)

In New Zealand they're called dags, in Australia dingleberries and in Co Durham winnets. (As in "Why man, they winnet come off.")

Alan Wood, now in Billingham, recalls that the old shepherd alongside whom he worked at Brampton Village, Darlington, in the 1960s knew the matted matter as dods.

"When we cut them off, it was dodding the sheep," adds Alan.

Since every dog has its day off, we now plan a short holiday. We return Northern line, on April 9.

Published: 26/03/2003