CONTINUING my attempt to make my wild goose chase into October 1930 profitable, I'm posting this brilliant picture of Aycliffe Village.

The Village was then on the Great North Road, from London to Edinburgh.

Memories has become rather bogged down around Aycliffe at the moment. We've been looking at how the east coast mainline, and the A1(M), runs through the Isles - a large prehistoric lake, now drained but still very muddy.

Those articles are to continue: I've been sent some superb photos, even of Bradbury station, which I'd never seen before.

Let's try this theory out. Linger and Die was a fantastically-named terrace of railside cottages to the north of Bradbury. The accepted derivation was that this was because of the incline of the railway: if an engine was caused to linger at a signal, it wouldn't be able to take away again, and so would die.

Others have said it was because soldiers were once billeted in the terrace in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, and they named it "linger and die".

A new theory floats my way. Both Linger and Die and Pity Me are ironic names given by farmers who were struggling to scratch a living out of a meagre patch of land.

When I told my informant that I thought Pity Me derived from the French for Petit Mere, it was kindly suggested that this was the sort of theory dreamt up by people who had spent too much time at university and not enough time fiddling in the fields of Durham. Any truth in this?