Why does Britain have such bizarre place names?

I love looking at the history and etymology of place names (more here in the US than in the UK though). Just around where I grew up, there are some pretty interesting place names, more than a few of which nobody knows the actual origin of. For example:

Civietown - an unincorporated community in Brunswick County, NC. Except, if you look at really old USGS maps, the name used to be Sivey-Town, and the location was different by a couple of miles. Nobody knows what Sivey-Town means either, although there's some speculation that it has something to do with a kind of bean called a Seve bean.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:W7m_Re2...

We also have places like Lockwood Folly... or is it Lockwood's Folly? Nobody is sure. And nobody is sure where the name came from, but it might have something to do with a ship built by a man named Lockwood, which proved unable to navigate the mouth of the river which came to bear the name "Lockwood Folly" (or Lockwood's Folly) and got stuck and eventually rotted to pieces, never making it to sea.

Then there's "Half Hell". Love that one. No real idea what that ever meant.

Even Shallotte, the closest nearby town... it's rumored that the name has something to do with Shallot onions, but again, nobody seems to really know.

Bolivia, NC? Named after the country Bolivia? If so, what's the connection. Hmm...

And then you get cute names in other parts of NC, like

* Climax, NC

* Horneytown, NC

* Erect, NC

and many other gems. (See: https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/north-carolina/funny-town-na...).

Sadly the details of the origins of many of the place names seem to be lost to the sands of time, leaving just rumors, speculation and, maybe some wishful thinking.

Much like Russia, if you translate the Cyrillic into English they rseemble the UK ones.