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Talk of the town: how where you live got its name
dobiesdraw
Member Posts: 2,793
in The Rail
Taking the B-roads and branch lines from Ashby-de-la-Zouch down to Zennor, stopping off along the way at Great Snoring and Nempnett Thrubwell, Word of Mouth is exploring the origins of some of the UK’s most extraordinary place names.
Michael Rosen and linguists Dr Laura Wright and Professor Richard Coates discuss the meanings behind the most common village name formations: how did some of the stranger titles for towns come about? And what does the astonishing array of place names tell us about the history of the British Isles?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5SDjCt364rCWVY4FRcXxMyT/talk-of-the-town-how-where-you-live-got-its-name
Michael Rosen and linguists Dr Laura Wright and Professor Richard Coates discuss the meanings behind the most common village name formations: how did some of the stranger titles for towns come about? And what does the astonishing array of place names tell us about the history of the British Isles?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5SDjCt364rCWVY4FRcXxMyT/talk-of-the-town-how-where-you-live-got-its-name
Comments
1. The oldest place names come from the landscape
As the last ice sheet retreated about 10,000 years ago, and temperatures began to warm up, humans began to repopulate the British Isles. And they started to label the things they saw. Places named after local geographical features are the oldest type of names in both the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon languages.
Rivers: Some of the ancient river names are completely uninterpretable to us even today, like Severn, Test, Itchen and Trent. Some of those early river names were built into later place names like Exmouth (the mouth of the river Ex).
Hills: Numerous hills are enshrined in place names containing the suffix don, the old word for hill (eg. Wimbledon or Huntingdon). Pen actually means head in Welsh but it is also used to name hilly places. That may have been the way the English dealt with it when they heard it being uttered by Celtic speakers.
Valleys: Places containing dale, dean, dene, combe, coombe, slad or slade all relate to valleys (eg. Rottingdean). And let us not forget that the presence of a bottom (eg. Ramsbottom) almost always means valley.
Fords: Places with shallow river crossings often contain the suffix ford (eg. Stamford).
Rocks: What does the Cloud in Temple Cloud mean? It’s not what you might expect. In Old English the word means a towering rock or a precipice. It has only recently come to mean the fluffy white things in the sky.