The Enid Blyton Society

It's an odd name "Spiggy", like a child's nickname -- but it's a smuggler and a place named after him.

Blyton was usually superb at giving places verisimilitudinous names, and this one sticks out like a bit of gristle in a stew, so what could she have been thinking when she wrote this?

I have a suggestion -- the name could be a corruption of the Italian name Respighi.

Great Pines Of Rome you could be right!!

I must admit, when I was a child, the name 'Spiggy Holes' was very exciting and inviting. It made the book very attractive to me, and I loved the story. Strangely, as an adult, I find it the weakest in the series.

Which backs up what Enid used to say about not listening to any critic over the age of 12!

I guess Enid knew what she was doing!

I've always loved the name "Spiggy Holes". It sounds quaint and exciting and reminds me of real-life names like Wookey Hole and Boggy Bottom.

I've always considered Spiggy Holes to be a great name with a promise of excitement.

Just had a thought that "Spiggy" might have been inspired by the word "spigot", which is a peg or plug for stopping the vent of a cask or barrel - something with which smugglers of alcoholic beverages would have been very familiar.

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I agree with Eddie. I always thought it was just one of Enid's special made up names. Being so unusual I felt certain that dark and exciting adventures were going to occur there.

My own guess is that although Enid made the name up she was - consciously or not - thinking of the Purbeck name 'Spyway', namely Spyway Farm / Barn. This is the old farm on the hilltop that you have to pass on a walk up the track from parking in the village of Langton Matravers (or if it was already in use in the late 1930s the car park a few hundred yards up the track) over the hill to Dancing Ledge. Enid seems to have known about the rock-cut pool at DL by the time she wrote First Term at Malory Towers, which has an identical pool, though she may not have visited it that early. Even if she had not walked past Spyway on her way to DL during a trip to the Corfe area in the 1930s (her first stay in Swanage was after Spiggy Holes was published) she would have seen the name on a map.
The 'Holes' of SH seem to have come from the real life smugglers caves between Beer and Seaton in NE Devon, near her ?1936 holiday destination of Budleigh Salterton, which were known as either the 'Beer Holes' or 'Seaton Holes'. The 'well-known' smuggler Spiggy is dated at around 100 years before the Arnolds' visit, and if you go back the same length of time from the book's publication you get to the late 1830s, within the lifetime of well-known Beer smuggler Jack Rattenbury (who even wrote an autobiography, possibly partly 'ghost-written'). 'Spiggy Holes' is also across the bay from 'Longrigg' - do the L and R hint at Seaton's neighbour Lyme Regis? It's all plausible, anyway!

Also, the house the children stay in is called 'Peep-Hole' which backs up the idea regards the caves near Budleigh Salterton.