Bus puzzle for those who know their Inions
All aboard... but where's that that they're going to?
Alan Bason of Shrewsbury has been intrigued by this photo which we used in Pictures From The Past showing a bus at Bishop's Castle during the war. It is the village name on the destination board that caught his eye.
"It's a nice picture with a good old honest Shropshire registration," he says, adding it is quite possible that the children are still alive.
"What intrigues me is that although the destination board seems to have room for another letter, Einion has no 'e' but is spelt with a capital 'I'. Has the spelling changed?
"My oldest map is from 60 years ago, but the village is shown as Cefn Einion. It's puzzling."
A look on a more modern map, and a trawl on the internet both show that Cefn Einion – it's a village a few miles south west of Bishop's Castle – does seem to be the accepted spelling these days.
However, potential support for Cefn Inion being an ancient spelling comes from a 1828 list of debtors who included "John Meyrick, formerly of Bishops Moat, in the Parish of Mainstone, Salop, and late of Cefn Inion, in the Parish of Clun, in the said County, Labourer."
The photo was taken in 1944 at the side of the Castle Hotel in Bishop's Castle and comes from the South West Shropshire Archaeological Society. The bus pictured is a wartime utility Bedford operated by R W Carpenter.
