Brookmans Park its transmitter station at Bell Bar. The war years resulted in many being evacuated to Brookmans Park from London, but the surrounding area was also hit. Brookmans School was built as the village grew. Local legend has it that Miss Muffet was Patience Moffat, daughter of entomologist Dr. Thomas Moffat (possibly Moffett or Moufet), who lived in the area from 1553 to 1604 on a farm. He had invited a poet over for Christmas. During his stay he overheard Miss Moffat tell her father of how she was eating her curds and whey when a spider came down from the
There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill "There was an old woman lived under a hill" is a nursery rhyme which dates back to at least its first known printing in 1714. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 797. In 1714 these lines: appeared as part of a catch in "The Academy of Complements". In 1744 these lines appeared by themselves (in a slightly different form) in "Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book", the first extant collection of nursery rhymes. One eighteenth-century editor, possibly Oliver Goldsmith, added a note: "This is a self evident Proposition