ART. XXVI. —A Plea for the Old Names. Part III.* By MISS POWLEY, Langwathby.

Read at Carlisle, August 7th, 1882, before the Royal Archaological Institute and this Society.

THE names of places which have no history offer a fund

of interest to the observer of old words and their uses in the district, and may render acceptable a few more words of appeal for them to the Society which has the opportunity of testing their fitness. It is long since Mr. Robert Ferguson pointed out the frequency of Scandinavian proper names among those of families and places as evidence, when taken with the popular speech, of a colonization of these shores which has never been recorded. As we have here no Domesday Book, or other writen authority for the older names, there may be less danger of too hasty construction in the expression of accord in these views, if experience and observation shew us such uniformity of charcter in names of the obscurest spots. When we find in places almost unvisited and unwritten of, save by the old settlers themselves, an old Norse word descriptive of the physical features of the spot, and another of ownership or association, consistent in chronology, we must believe the truth such names convey. And when we see how fast old names are wearing out, and those who remember them passing away, it would seem as if it might be a greater error if no one should record them, or venture a few words on their behalf, in the hearing of a larger audience. For this is a matter out of the way of strangers; it is connected with our dialect which they seldom hear, and which is not easily learnt. And, however well-established Mr. Ferguson's opinion among dialecticians may be, there seems a failure

* For Part I. see ante Vol. iv., p. 19; for Part II., ibid, p. 280.

in its recognition, often by the learned, in regard to the names of our own district, of our peculiar northern antiquity of speech.

There is an old Northern word Flow, which many must remember as giving name to unstable boggy tracts along the Scottish Border. I have seen an old map in which the word accompanied the name of almost every parish, as if each had its portion of quicksand and quagmire, to which the word probably applied, though we only have it in names, and for a very limited extent. Mr. Dickinson says flow is an "extensive unsheltered peat-bog," and mentions Wedholme Flow, Bowness Flow, Solway Flow, &c. But except here, and in the wild and lonely tracts of the mining fells of Alston Moor, the word seems now not to exist as a name. It is not used, as I see Scottish writers do, in composition, as the moss-flows; nor anywhere in poetry or prophecy as a separate word, on this side the Border, as in the hands of Scott, with such power, in the Master of Ravenswood fulfilling his doom

"To stable his steed in the Kelpie's Flow,

And his name shall be lost for evermoe." (sic.)

Yet it may have been given as a name of caution in the early watery days. I see in this week's papers a caution to persons trespassing in pursuit of game on Wedholme Flow for fear of legal consequences only. In my childhood there lived in this village a weird old Scotch woman of whom it was said that her father's was one of the twenty-eight tenements which were submerged "when Solway Flow came down ;" and that she and the rest of her family were rescued by the neighbours, as soon as they could be drawn up through the chimney; after which Nelly ran away to England and got hired and settled. It was probably when this catastrophe required a record in print, in 1771, that the name was changed to Moss, as it has since been written. But there had been a battle of Sollom Moss in

Henry

Henry VIII.'s time, when Sir Thomas Wharton overcame a Scottish marauding party; and each word had its own associations, and those of Solway Flow were widely known, and not soon forgotten.* I have heard that when the first Sir James Graham of Netherby was presented at Court, on his marriage, some years after, George III., in his usual, rapid, impulsive manner, was heard to utter-"Oh! Solway Flow, Solway Flow, Solway Flow!" The parish of Burgh is always an exception with its Marsh; for it became historical when Edward I. died there, and required its chronicler in modern English. The name Burgh Marsh in speech always seemed an alien in the county, where it does not, to my knowledge, occur again, or did not till these advertising days, when some adjoining parishes adopt the same. some Yorkshire parishes it appears in form of Marske.

In

Flow is only one of the northern words descriptive of the same or nearly the same spots which seem so abundant in this region. It may be that a colonization from a different coast brought variety of terms, where they seem so thickly strewn. But the suecession of swamps in the old days must have required both variation and ingenuity to avoid confusion in their sub-divisions. So we may have flow, carr, mire, moss, sump, slake, forth, and bog, often within short distance, in field names, where they have remained in the possession or management of the native people. In this parish, occupying more than three miles of the eastern border of the Eden, the repetition, yet modification and distinction, by these, other such kindred words as holme, which is general, and ing, coming in above Lazonby only, is truly remarkable-holme once an island, and ing a meadow adding to the richness of association. Ingmire, Dubmire, Bogmire, and such others occur often. Since the advertising of grazing land in local papers the preservation of

In that part called Solway Flow, in the year 1771 was a memorable outburst of water, moss, gravel, sand and stone, which spread over and destroyed about 600 acres of fine level fertile ground and totally altered that part of the country. Nicolson and Burns History of Cumberland p. 473.

field names is privilege for which I beg to record grateful acknowledgment, and to express a hope for its continuance; its loss to country archæological inquirers would be a discouragement only inferior to the removal of the old Parish Registers to London.

If flow belonged to the more liquid, or totterbogs, as we should say, carr seems usually applied to places where the deeper recesses of the old foundations have been in process of time filled up by subsidence, and from the action of rains and rivers in the deep valleys have settled down into the rich green level tract, larger or smaller, according to its surroundings, which bears the name. Every year since my advocacy of this word, in the old Norse sense only, where never one stone was found on another, I have seen an advertisement of grazing land at Botcherby. It was one of my lessons in Fieldlore. I asked a friend to visit the fields named Old Carr, and let me know if they were rocky fields; the answer was, "Quite the reverse, like the carrs nearer home." Anthony Willows I know must be those nearest the river. Many in other such places have Willows and Wythes as their name; and the two Piper Mires were doubtless the grazing land set apart for the Town Piper, when that office was thus privileged by the municipality of merrie Carlisle, as of many other cities. All quite consistent with the geology, the history, and the social arrangements of the valley and the parish (if no longer descriptive, highly suggestive.) Such marks, where larger tracts have been laid together, are too often lost in the terms park, pasture, and others of general import given by professional agents.

As the new glossaries of the English Dialect Society of the Northern Counties have carr, and that of Lincoln mentions many tracts bearing the name, it is to be hoped it may cease to be a stumbling block to Southrons, though it has not yet done so. We are often indebted to strangers for illustration of our own antiquities, and should be glad to communicate anything worth knowing in return.

But for

for Horne Tooke's Diversions of Purley we should have known nothing of the Floating Island named car near Hawkshead, its date, 1795, and excellent description proving it to be an upburst from the bogs, though Mr. Tooke latinized its name; and to Mr. Moncure Conway, in Harper's Monthly I owe the fact, wanting in my last paper, that the Floating Island is still to be seen on the little lake of Priest Pot, changing from side to side with the wind, and this proves its existence for probably a hundred years. Its willows were tall in 1795.

There is an excellent paper and etching of the Stone Circle at Gunnerkeld, near Keswick, now in Vol. IV. p. 537, of our Transactions, by Mr. Dymond. It is copied by the kindness of another Society, perhaps of different associations. So that the foot note, "The name in local parlance means sportman's spring," may not be so foreign to our ideas as it looks. For we have no such word as Gunner for a sportsman in Cumberland. Only in Carlisle, as applied to an artillery soldier, has the word been heard. Nor was Keld ever known as a dialect word, in speech or writing. It is in names of the prehistoric era that we find it, and the uncertainty of its pronunciation show how little it has been understood. Threlkeld is called Threlket, and the two Salkelds, Saffelt, in our rustic speech. Remarking on the frequency of this word, and klint, in field names, I was told by a gentleman who gave me lists from many parishes, that neither word now conveyed any idea of its meaning, as a spring and a rock, O.N. Of course, since Professor Worsaaes' visit and its consequences, the people who read have learnt it. Gunnar is one of the distinctive Scandinavian proper names given by Mr. Ferguson.* It is a not uncommon name of the Northmen, and often associated with honour. There is also Gunnershow, which may be the grave-mound of the same hero, or of some of

Northmen in Cumberland and Westmoreland, p. 131.