The Blue Ball

In the wake of Storm Darragh, today was a much better day with plenty of sunshine, but a very cold wind. Once  again we were up in East Devon and had lunch at the Blue Ball Inn. There are a number of Inns with the same name and several accounts of how the Blue Ball got its name. The most likely here is that it was once a coaching Inn, and that the name derives from the practice of raising a blue ball on a pole to alert the driver of the carriage to the fact that there were guests at the Inn requiring passage.