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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the lighter-side-of-life dept.

Unusually heavy winter rains have flooded the town of Chertsey, west of London, twice in the past three years. Only its old center—a raised plot on the bank of the River Thames where Anglo-Saxon monks built an abbey in the seventh century—has remained consistently dry. For most residents, the rising waters, often stinking with sewage, have come as an unwelcome surprise after centuries of a relatively dry, stable climate. They seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, this telling fact about the place they call home: In Old English, Chertsey means "Ceorot's island."

The name harkens back to the Early Medieval Period, when Germanic tribes began to settle, and name, many of the places dotting maps of modern Britain. Back then, water was ubiquitous. Sediment deposits dating to this era paint a picture of overtopped riverbanks and runoff rushing down slopes. "Anglo-Saxon England was a water world," says Richard Jones, a landscape historian at the University of Leicester. He studies how early English settlers used place names, or toponyms, to encode practical information about their watery environment. For instance, Byfleet, a village in southern England, indicates a "tidal creek," or "estuary"; Buildwas, in the west, describes "land subject to rapid flooding and draining"; and Averham, in the east, a "settlement at the floods."

What does it mean for North Piddle, Shitterton, Crapstone, and Scratchy Bottom?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @06:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @06:16PM (#268084)

    Probably how the Avon River got its name. Afon is Cymraeg (Welsh) for river. It's pretty easy to imagine a proto-Englishman asked a Britan what it was called and getting the common noun instead of the proper noun.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:36PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:36PM (#268129) Journal

    If I recall correctly there's a hill in Britain called hillhillhillhillhill hill, but with only the final hill in english. I forget what the others were, so I'll guess Pict, Welsh, Saxon, and Norse...but one of them could have been Cornish for all I really know.

    IOW, it's a pretty common way for people to name things, sort of like we have ATM machines.

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