Words: truggery, n.

IF ONE were to wind down the window and ask directions to the truggery, many would react with a blush and a stammer, for this means brothel - either from the Italian trucca ("tart") or truck (trade - as in no truck with that).

At Herstmonceux, in Sussex, however, they are more than happy to point it out, as it is something for which the place is as well known as its castle (where Lord Dacre's ghost frightened off his widow's suitors).

Not that the natives are of easy virtue; far from it, on the whole: trug - from trough - is a 19th-century Sussex invention, a vital aid in gardening, nimbly described in the Athenaeum (1862) as "a flat basket, not of wicker, but of flakes of sallow, braced with ash and furnished with a handle of the latter wood".