renting a car in Dover from a place in the Maison Dieu Road, pronounced "Mason Doo" by the young woman working there. It's not just Americans...

Cornish towns are fun, more for the sheer improbability of the names than for the improbability of their pronunciation. "Perranarworthal", for example, is pronounced as it is written, which is in itself surprising.

Something I read recently in one of Bill Bryson's books (Made In America) was that the spelling placenames was regularised by a geographical names board. One of their more Philistinic acts was to say that all place names pronounced with the suffix "-burg" or "-boro" should be spelt that wayh exactly, and none of this confusing "-burgh" or "-borough" nonsense ("Pittsburgh" was given an explicit exemption).

Posting from IE on WinXP now, and I note my little fiddle has fixed the PNG problem. More in 'Notes'...

(IE users should request a full reload of this page to get things looking - hopefully - right)

Yep, seems to work from here.