I am just back from what would be called a ‘driving holiday’ (an oxymoron, I think) in England. After a delightful family wedding in the Derbyshire dales, my gang stayed a few days in the Lake District to break the journey home.
The Lake District is much hyped as one of the most attractive parts of these islands. I might be tempted to smugly dismiss it as ‘Ireland’. Those of us fortunate to live on the beautifully formed island just to the west can enjoy mountain-lake panoramas and verdant sheep-speckled fields without enduring an overcrowded Friday ferry and a punishing car journey.
But it is very nice. I was there a few times as a kid, and it was good to find that much was as it was, including the hazily remembered pencil museum and Ye Olde Friars sweet shop in Keswick, even if this time, I was more focussed on finding the nearest hipster café to shelter from the mizzle.
And taking the car did throw up one unexpected pleasure of this trip: reading the placenames on road signs.
The first one that leapt at me was not far off the ferry at Cairnryan: ‘Haugh of Urr’.
What could that even be? Surely something more mystical than a mere village, but that’s what it is. Here is what the name means:
OK, but ‘Cumbric’?
Wow. And there was me thinking Britain was straightforwardly made up of ‘England’, ‘Scotland’, and ‘Wales’, and the ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ and ‘Welsh’. One placename and you stumble across all these ancient, buried languages, peoples, and kingdoms. Down the road, ‘Haugh of Urr’ is given a run for its money by ‘Gatehouse of Fleet’.
But it was in the Lake District that I really began to struggle to steer the car in a straight line. ‘Threlkeld’ was off to the left somewhere. My Scandi-sense told me this might be Nordic-Norse-Viking, and Wikipedia confirmed:
The English Lakes – land of Wordsworth, Peter Rabbit et al, Victorian tourists sailing on gentle steamers – were inhabited by Vikings! Some of them came via Ireland and Scotland. In fact, numerous placenames in the Lake District have Norse origins, giving the region an enjoyable Middle Earth-Narnia aura.[1]
‘Aira Force’ is a waterfall. But don’t think ‘Delta Force’, think ‘Dettifoss’, or any of those Icelandic or Norwegian waterfalls with ‘foss’ in their name:
Some of the lakes including ‘Ullswater’ and ‘Windermere’ (surely as beautiful a placename as you could ever devise) are also of part Norse origin. [2] Worth a read is this blog post by Rory Stewart, who was MP for the area, in which he reports that Penrith, on the edge of the Lake District, has the highest concentration of Scandinavian DNA in England.
I could go on and on. One intriguing placename after another kept appearing by the road. That they were all written in the standard UK road sign typeface only enhanced the names’ poetry, whimsy, or strangeness.
Of course, placenames held no appeal when I was last in the Lake District 25 or 30 years ago, nor even when I last drove a car in Britain 15 years ago. I’ve found them a lot more interesting since encountering the Turas project in East Belfast which educates people about the Irish origins of placenames in Northern Ireland. The message is that our standard Orange-Green history is more complex than it looks.[3] While in the Lake District, I happened to be reading the truly brilliant Europe: An Intimate Journey by Jan Morris, the famous travel writer. She was a staunch Welsh nationalist, and one of her themes is how modern state borders bear only the loosest of relation to the actual cultural map of the continent.
That’s a good thing to remember. But maybe it’s best not to romanticise placenames too much, just as it’s best not to plant our identity too firmly in history of any kind. History often turns out to be not very firm at all. We might enjoy uncovering the Norse names of the Lake District then find, as is apparently the case, that they simply eradicated older ones.
I had a memorable time with my family last week in a place I had visited a long time ago. Perhaps that’s the only history that matters.
[1] ‘Dale’, by the way, is from the Norse for valley.
[2] ‘Mere’ apparently comes from the Old English for ‘lake’, making ‘Lake Windermere’ a tautology, like Co. Down’s ‘Ards Peninsula’ which means Peninsula Peninsula.
[3] I’m reminded of how Claire Mitchell, in her superb book on the nuances of ‘Protestant’ cultural identity in Ireland, briefly shares a fantasy that joining some kind of Nordic-Celtic confederation might be the most appropriate political arrangement for Ireland, given the historical and cultural connections between all these green, chilly northern lands.
David Mitchell 