Meandering

A late afternoon walk beside the reservoir. After yesterday's rain, the air is clear; reflections from the water are blinding; boats, birds and sails are silhouettes. We returned via the old turnpike road through the twin villages where we are staying - or 'townships' as an old, eroded stone declares them to be, demarcating sternly where one ends and the other begins

We stopped by the almshouses, endowed for accommodating 'two poor men and two poor women', puzzled by a name that is not that of either village. I now know (because I asked in the pub!) that it is a local abbreviation of one of the names but, searching the web for clues, I was led into a stranger quirk of history driven by local ways of speaking

As blipper kendall correctly asserted yesterday, local landowners became rich off the labour of the lead miners, in this case the Gell family, who owned the manor here for over 650 years, until selling up only 35 years ago. It was they who endowed the almshouses that started my search. To get their ore to smelters beside the Cromford canal, the family built, around 1790, a road that they somewhat pretentiously called the 'Via Gellia'. The name stuck, though, and still appears on Google maps. Unversed in Latin (or not prepared to indulge his lordships foibles), the locals called it the 'vie jella' (to rhyme with Nigella) 

Roll forward a century, and an enterprising local mill owner in the valley where the Via Gellia runs developed a new wool/cotton blended thread and wove a light but warm cloth from it that he thought would be a winner. Casting around for a name for his creation, he must have heard his staff talking about their route to work, decided it would be distinctive and 'Viyella' was born. An odd twist of fate that the demotically-named Viyella shirt has become the item of choice for 'smart casual' wear among a certain tranche of the English rural upper class

The Gell's eccentricity did not stop with cod Latin. They had constructed this so-called 'crinkle crankle wall' along one side of their garden because... well, because they could