AT WIVENHOE, in Essex, the low line of the hills has the shape of the heels of a person lying face-down. The name contains the shape: a hoh is a ridge that rises to a point and has a concave end. At Wooller in Northumberland, however, the hilltop is level, with a convex sloping shoulder. The hidden word here is ofer, “a flat-topped ridge”. Early Anglo-Saxon settlers in England, observing, walking and working the landscape, defined its ups and downs with a subtlety largely missing from modern, motorised English. Dozens of words, none of them synonymous, described the look of a hill, the angle of slope and the way trees grew upon it. And after the Anglo-Saxons, no one looked at the landscape in quite that way until Margaret Gelling.
She was a neat, keen, merry woman, “prissy” as she described herself, and sensibly shod and clad. The gear was appropriate for slopping through slæp, fenn, myrr and slohtre (the disappointing origin of Upper and Lower Slaughter), or stomping through leah, hurst, holt and græfe, where trees were felled and coppiced and axes rang in the woods. Though she spent much of the time with her nose in one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, tracking the contour lines, she found them a “coarse instrument” for her purpose. When it came to understanding English place names, there was no substitute for donning your wellies and using your eyes.
Mrs Gelling worked for the English Place-Name Society, formally and informally, from 1946. From 1986 to 1998 she was its president. She never held an academic post, but lectured widely, wrote a dozen books and produced three of the county surveys of place names. She was devoted to the proposition that names drawn from the landscape were not trivial or accidental, but original and important. All her passion for argument was employed to prove that hamm, a piece of land almost enclosed by water, was as vital a suffix as ham, a man-made enclosure; that an ending in -den might come from denu, a long and sinuous valley, rather than denn, a woodland pig-pasture; and that the hall in Coggeshall came from halh, a nook or a hollow, not some grand building. Cogg's nook, a little recess tucked into the 150-foot contour line, was perhaps the best place where he could put his hut. With Mrs Gelling, topography always came first.
No subtlety escaped her. The suffix fyrhth was not simply wood, but “scrubland at the edge of the forest”. The word wæss was not just swamp, but—she was particularly proud of this—“land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly”. She had observed this herself at Buildwas, on the winding Severn in Shropshire, where between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon the flooding river drained from the land “as if a plug had been pulled out”. A feld was not necessarily ground broken for arable, but any open country in the almost all-covering fifth-century forest. And an ærn was not merely a house, but a place where something was stored in bulk and worked on: so that Brewerne, in Cambridgeshire, acquired a smell of beer, and Colerne, in Wiltshire, a dusting of charcoal.
This “obsession”, as she happily called it, seemed to have begun at St Hilda's in Oxford, where she found her English course boring, but was encouraged by Dorothy Whitelock to look at place names. They appealed immediately to the socialist, even communist, instincts with which she liked to shock her parents. Most of the place names of England had been bestowed not by officialdom, or in deference to knights, earls or kings, but by ordinary peasants coping with flooded pasture or looking over the hills. That habit had long died out; but as a resident of Birmingham (“village of Beorma's people”) for most of her life, she liked to think that Spaghetti Junction, the giant intersection of roads just north of the city, was a solitary modern example of the will of the people expressed in a name.
She was less egalitarian when it came to the business of sorting out what names meant. There were too many snares and snags involved “to invite general participation in the process of suggesting etymologies”. Who, for example, would catch that Chiswick and Keswick both meant “cheese-farm”, or that the tasty-sounding Fryup, in Yorkshire, meant “Frig's remote valley”? Who could safely sort out ea, as in Eton, meaning a river, from ey, Old Norse for island? Who would dare to hazard a meaning for Wixhill and Wingfield, if she herself left them as “obscure”?
Nonetheless, she was grateful when locals got in touch with her: telling her, for example, that the stream at Winsor in Hampshire was too tiny to carry the meaning, “river-bank where boats are pulled by a windlass”, she had posited for Windsor in Berkshire. She was delighted to think that the public, reading her books, would suddenly learn to read their habitat, and see it with completely different eyes. At Hartside in Cumbria, for example, a white deer would suddenly flash through the woods; at Earley, in Berkshire, white-tailed eagles would fly above a clearing. And better still, in the soulless suburbs of south London, Penge now marked “the wood's end”, and Croydon became “the valley where wild saffron grows”.