Mind your language
If you live in a place ending in –don (or sometimes –ton), such as Toot Baldon, Stottesdon (Shropshire) or Billington (Bedfordshire), you will probably find that the shape of the hill your town is built on differs from those designated by terminations –borough or –brough, as in Edlesborough, Granborough or Thornborough (Buckinghamshire).
I owe this observation to the brilliant Ann Cole, a geographer who has studied the lie of the land connected with different place-names and made drawings of their features. I had never believed it was possible. I’d assumed that the Old English dun (probably borrowed from Celtic) and beorg signified any kind of hill.
But Ann Cole has shown that dun meant a low hill, like an upturned bowl, with an area of flat land at the top on which a settlement might be built, and beorg meant a continuously sloping hill, with room at the top for no more than a single farmstead, or perhaps a church. Ann Cole and Margaret Gelling have co-authored a book, The Landscape of Place-Names (Shaun Tyas, Stamford, 2000).
I came across her drawings in the Cambridge Dictionary of Place-Names, published last year. It supersedes Eilert Ekwall’s Oxford Dictionary of English PlaceNames, but I had been slow to buy it, since it costs £200. You do get 713 pages for that, exploring 18,500 place-names, and it was the life’s work of Victor Watts, compiled over 15 years ‘amid the inconvenience and distraction that is the lot of one employed today in academic bowers’. He died a few months before it was printed.
Watts, as we might call it, is essential in telling whether your abode derives from beorg (as with Bergholt, Bearsted or Blackborough) and not from burh, which signifies a fortress (as with Middlesbrough and Burpham). Burrow Bridge in Somerset is from a hill; Nether Burrow in Lancashire from a fort.
Two other hill-name elements connected with a characteristic shape are ofer and ora. An ora was ‘like an upturned canoe or punt, having an extensive tract of flat land terminating at one or both ends with a rounded shoulder’. The element is common in the south of England, at places such as Windsor or Chinnor, while in the north a similar feature is designated by ofer (Haselor, Warwickshire, or Wentnor, Shropshire — but Wendover, Bucks, derives from words meaning ‘bright stream’).
I’m delighted by this relation between philology and topography. There are plenty more significant elements, and I shall get my husband to drive me to promising spots.
Dot Wordsworth
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