The map has been overwritten many times
Giles Turnbull’s notes on a public lecture on Wiltshire’s place names:
Place name study has boobytraps - place names are problematic for researchers. They suffer because people love to make sense of them, and in doing so obscure them.
Makes me think of Lamb’s Conduit Street in London, along which I imagined flocks of lambs being driven. Turns out that some guy named Lamb had a water conduit there.
I also like this bit about how place names get codified:
Names get fixed when they are written down. Many names were fixed in the Domesday Book, but remember that was written in abbreviated Latin by French invaders. Names got corrupted. The Ordnance Survey did the same thing for many minor place names when it was initiated 800 years later.
Most of Canada’s place names come from native languages - Canada was named after the Huron word kanata or “group of huts” (”our village”). The Geographical Names Board of Canada deals with such things, under the mandate that “by making traditional geographical names official, we can help value and preserve our Aboriginal heritage.”
But mostly, I like thinking about place names and their relation to people near and far:
The English word “welsh” was the Old English word for “foreigner” or “outsider”. It was, at the time, a very insulting term to use. It survives in place names with a wal- element, such as Walcot (”the cottage of the foreigners”) … Some Latin-sounding name elements were adopted by the Anglo Saxons, after Roman occupation, because they needed words to describe things they found in the British landscape that they had no word of their own for … In south Wiltshire there’s a concentration of -font suffixes (Urchfont, Teffont, etc). We think these were Anglo Saxon attempts to use the Latin word fontana to explain Roman water features, like irrigation systems and aquaducts.
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Wikipedia entry for toponymy, the study of place names