Plus ça change

Last weekend we went away to the seaside and passed through the village I grew up in. There have been several changes: the shop my mother worked in is now a house; the entire village is bypassed rather than carrying holiday-bound traffic through its centre; the petrol station has gone and replaced by houses.  And there were other significant developments.

This was my junior school. The door you can see on the left was the headmaster's house, and the long range to the right was our hall. The gable end at the right was the reception classroom. It was an old Victorian pile with high walls and windows that were so far up the walls we needed a long pole to open and close them. No staring outside and daydreaming!  These days it would be considered bad for education and children wouldn't be expected to progress under such conditions. But we loved it - and our teachers. We had small classes (there were only 96 pupils altogether) and our teachers cared about us and our learning.  These days its the area youth centre.

This was Wilson's farm. That field used to be full of cows, and twice a day they were guided off to the left and into a pasture on the opposite side of the road. Traffic stopped to let them wander across. Often it coincided with our walk to or from school. These days it's the site of a sheltered housing estate. They seem to have demolished the farmhouse, which is a shame. But it'll be a great place for people to live out their days.

Here's a close up of the wall in the last photo. I remember it as being higher. I an also remember Farmer Wilson shouting at us because a small gang of us were slowly dismantling it while we stood around chatting about nothing in particular. It wasn't vandalism, as such - we didn't mean any harm - it was just idle lack of thought. It's close to being a dry stone wall. There's actually nothing holding the wall together except careful positioning of the stones. The capstones are cemented, but nothing else is. Repairing it is a time-consuming, skilled job. Sorry Farmer Wilson!

This smart-looking B&B used to be a pig farm!  The pigs were free-range, in the field behind the wall on the right, and they were very friendly. You could scratch their backs and they would snort and wag their  curly little tails. Nobody was squeamish about bacon. It was just how life was.

Of course, we went for fish and chips from the chippy where I used to buy "six penn'orth of chips and scraps, please" whenever I could afford it.

I don't go back as far as 1946, but I do remember that range. It must have been second hand when it was installed, because it was an Art Deco sunray design in green and yellow, probably made of bakelite or something similar. It was definitely plastic. It was good to see the clock still there. The fish and chips were still as good as ever too!

This post has been for Five on Friday, hosted by Amy at Love Made My Home.

What's in a name?

Sea+mere =  large lake

What's in a name? Well, despite Juliet's assertion that names don't matter* there can be quite a lot of information in a name - particularly if it's a place name in the UK.

For this week's Five on Friday (to join in with Amy at Love Made My Home) I'm going to take a look at a few place names to show you how to get more out of your travels.  As we drive along even the swiftest motorway we see signs for all kinds of places that we've never been and are never likely to visit. But we can probably glean some information about them - just from those signs.
(Don't assume the photos match the text!)

Streetview snip

Huttons Ambo
Let's start with one of my favourites. Driving along the A64 through North Yorkshire, near Malton, you'll pass a sign for Huttons Ambo. There are lots of places in England called Hutton but, as far as I know, only one Huttons. There's a reason for that. Hutton comes from two Old English words, hoh and tun meaning a hill spur and a farmstead. Hence Hutton is a farmstead near a hill spur. Now, if you drive along the side road that's signposted Huttons Ambo you will find High Hutton and Low Hutton but you'll never find the mythical Huttons Ambo, because it doesn't exist. Ambo is Latin for 'both', so the sign is directing you to 'both Huttons', rather than a single place.



Stiffkey
Of course you can't always tell much from the name as it appears today. Modern place names have been handed down for many years, In the case of some towns that existed in Roman times that can be as long as 2,000 years. One of the earliest written records of English places was the Domesday Book; a survey of towns and villages carried out on the orders of William the Conquerer in 1086, very shortly after he won the Battle of Hastings. He wanted to know exactly how many people he now ruled and exactly what they were worth (for tax purposes). Domesday is a useful, although sometimes misleading, source about place names. On the other hand it can be surprisingly enlightening.

Over the intervening period the pronunciation of place names can have changed dramatically, and their spelling has often changed beyond recognition. Take Stiffkey, for example, on the Norfolk coast. How would you pronounce it?  I'm willing to bet you'd be wrong! Domesday lists it as Stiuekai, which is much more like what the locals call it today - Stukey. On the other hand, the actual word comes from two Old English terms styfic and eg, meaning an island in a marsh, with tree stumps. (Now try the nearby town of Happisburgh and see how long it takes you to come up with the modern pronunciation of Hazebruh. No, I don't understand either!)

Skarthi's Burh

Scarborough
A note for my Transatlantic readers. There are lots of towns that end with the suffix -borough in the UK. Please note, they are not pronounced 'borrow'. Borough (and similar endings like Edin-burgh) are all pronounced 'bruh' like the first syllable of brother. There's a reason for that. It's because all those endings come from an Old English word burh, meaning a stronghold or fortified town. The first half of the name then tells you something else about the place. In Scarborough's case it's the name of the guy who founded it - one Skarthi (sometimes written Skardi because of the nordic rune 'thorn' that looks like d but is pronounced th) who was the Viking lord who turned up in 966 and established a settlement there. Previously it had been the site of a Roman signal station, but Skarthi's Burh was the first town. There are other 'borough' towns, such as Boroughbridge, where the etymology is obvious, but beware. Borough Green, for example, is thought to stem from beorg, meaning hill.

Breedon on the Hill

The church, Breedon on the Hill

While we're on the topic of hills let's look at an oddity. The waves of people who settled or conquered Britain over the years all had their own language and all gave their own names to the places they found. But it has led to some strange anomalies. Are you all familiar with the story of the Australian settlers who asked a local the name of the strange, bounding animal they saw in the distance? They received the reply 'kangaroo' and the animal has been known as such in English ever since. Apparently 'kangaroo' is aboriginal for 'I don't know'. (This story is possibly apocryphal. Kangaroo.)

Now imagine a Saxon settler wandering through the land that would later be known as Leicestershire and spotting a high hill that looks like a safe place to set up a village. The conversation possibly went a little like this.
Saxon: "Excuse me good man, what is the name of that fine cliff in the distance?"
Celt: "Bree"
Saxon: "Thank you, my woad-painted friend. I shall settle my village there and I shall call it Bree Hill."
(Or in his language, Bree Don, because that's the old Saxon word for hill.)

Many years later the village has become known as Breedon and map makers, to distinguish it from lots of other Breedons in the country, call it Breedon on the Hill - or Hill Hill on the Hill. You can't miss it. Just drive up the A42 through Leicestershire and you'll see it without any trouble at all. (Of course the village is actually at the BOTTOM of the hill because it's too steep to make living at the top workable. Only the church is at the top.)

West farmstead owned by Queen Edith. (Wife of Ed the Confessor)

Manorial names
So how can I round this up? There are so many different place names, and so many reasons for those names, that limiting myself to just five is almost impossible.  I could pick another favourite at random. Marsh Gibbon sounds exotic, doesn't it? But actually it just means marshy land owned by the Gibwen family. Higham Ferrers? Main (high) enclosure (ham) belonging to the Ferrers family. You'll find such manorial suffixes all over the country. Many of them are French-sounding. That's because the people who first wrote down the names in any meaningful way were French Normans, remember? Domesday and all that. Of course, the previous names were often possessive too. Goadby Marwood, for example, means farmstead of a man called Goadi, now owned by the Marwood family.

So now you know. Next time you go on a journey take note of any interesting places you spot, then see if you can find out how they got their names. But first go visit Amy at Love Made My Home and see what other fives people have found for you this week.


References
*What's in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet. Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.
Huttons Ambo Village Website. http://huttonsambo.blogspot.co.uk/p/about-huttons-ambo.html
Mills, A. D. 1998 Dictionary of English Place-Names. Oxford University Press.