Within the Residence Counties, historical British (or Welsh) place names are primarily gone – apart from river names. Right here they linger, from the Thames to smaller watercourses such because the splendidly named Rib, Beane and Maran (or Mimram) in Hertfordshire. Typically English newcomers didn’t perceive these phrases. Avon, after all, has the identical derivation as afon, Welsh for river. Bredon Hill consists of no fewer than three phrases with the identical which means: bre is Welsh and dun is Outdated English, each translating as ‘hill’. So: Hill-hill Hill!
Some place names inform of occasions. You may monitor the primary part of Viking settlement in hybrid names equivalent to Grimston, denoting an English settlement (or village) taken by Grim, a number one member of the Nice Military that invaded Britain from 865. Then, with the second wave of migration, got here the names ending in ‘by’, which means farm – Grimsby, for instance. Lastly, there are the ‘thorp’ names, which means homestead, as in Scunthorpe. These names had been left by third-wave immigrants who had been pressured to open up poorer land on the fringes.
Place names present how the dominant language takes over, in whichever means it occurs. Internationally, the sample was the identical – particularly within the age of imperialism. Consider the overlay of English names in Eire, Australia, New Zealand or the US. There the indigenous inhabitants had been worn out or pushed into corners, but place names related to them nonetheless populate the panorama, from Alabama to Wyoming. Take Michigan, which is ‘massive lake’ within the speech of the Ottawa tribe; or Mississippi, ‘Huge River’ in Algonquin. From Malibu to the Napa Valley, telltale signposts stay, regardless of ethnic cleaning by European settlers and colonialists. In Eire as not too long ago as 2005, the Placenames Fee issued an inventory of two,000 Gaelic equivalents to English place names. And, after all, individuals in energy are nonetheless at it – witness Donald Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.
A revealing instance is advised in Sacred Panorama (2002), a exceptional guide by the Israeli author, historian and political scientist Meron Benvenisti. His father was an Israeli geographer on the Authorities Names Fee tasked after 1948 with giving Palestinian villages and landscapes names linked to Israel’s biblical homeland. New Hebrew place names, resonating with the biblical story of the Holy Land, changed the Arabic names of greater than 9,000 pure options, villages and even ruins within the new Israel. Benvenisti’s story exhibits first-hand how place names had been used to assist change an earlier Arab panorama into the fashionable Israeli state.
In fact, such issues have occurred all through historical past. Centuries after the Moors had been expelled from Spain, at this time’s vacationers can nonetheless detect the contours of Muslim Spain, from the Alhambra to Granada’s Zacatín (clothes-sellers) Avenue – nonetheless a garments market. But a Palestinian returning now to his ancestral panorama after seven a long time away would usually be laborious pushed to establish the websites of his erstwhile house. The signposts are gone.
The story Benvenisti tells is a few battle over the “signposts of reminiscence” which can be important to all human beings. Because the novelist Milan Kundera mentioned, “the battle of man towards energy is the battle of reminiscence towards forgetting.” Typically slowly, imperceptibly, over time – however generally at a stroke – historical past is erased. However generally it nonetheless magically endures, even over millennia. Folks have lengthy recollections. Ask the folks in Ipplepen.
This column was first printed within the July 2025 problem of BBC History Magazine