Roman Place Names

The other day, I got to pondering about the legacy of the Roman Empire in English place names. I have identified sixty places which derive their modern name from the Latin ‘castra’. This is the most likely source for Roman derived names although I could have extended the study to include Street as in Stretford or stratford which carries memories of Roman roads.

The results are set out below.

Acaster Yorkshire West Riding
Alcester Warwickshire
Alchester Oxfordshire
Ancaster Lincolnshire
Bewcastle Northumberland
Bicester Oxfordshire
Binchester Durham
Brancaster Norfolk
Caister Lincolnshire
Caister St Edmunds Norfolk
Castleford Yorkshire West Riding
Chester Cheshire
Chester le Street Durham
Chesterfield Derbyshire
Chesters Northumberland
Chesterton Huntingdonshire
Chesterton Warwickshire
Chesterton Northumberland (in Newcastle upon Tyne)
Chichester Sussex
Cirencester Gloucestershire
Colchester Essex
Corchester Northumberland
Doncaster Yorkshire West Riding
Dorchester Dorset
Dorchester Oxfordshire
East Caister Norfolk
Ebchester Durham
Exeter Devon
Gloucester Gloucestershire
Godmanchester Huntingdonshire
Grantchester Cambridgeshire
Great Casterton Rutland
Great Chesterford Essex
Great Chesters Northumberland
High Rochester Northumberland
Horncastle Lincolnshire
Ilchester Somerset
Irchester Northamptonshire
Kenchester Herefordshire
Lancaster Lancaster
Lanchester Durham
Leicester Leicestershire
Littlechester Derbyshire
Mancetter Warwickshire
Manchester Lancaster
Muncaster Cumberland
Papcastle Cumberland
Porchester Hampshire
Ribchester Lancashire
Rochester Kent
Rodchester Northumberland
Roper’s Castle? Westmoreland
Silchester Hampshire
Tadcaster Yorkshire West Riding
The Chesters Gloucestershire
Towcester Northamptonshire
Winchester Hampshire
Woodchester Gloucestershire
Worcester Worcestershire
Wroxeter Shropshire

(My sources are;-
E.Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names ( fourth edition, Oxford, 1960)
and
Ordnance Survey, Map of Roman Britain (third edition, Chessington, 1956 )

It is not surprising that Northumberland, with Hadrian’s Wall, has the most entries or that Cornwall has none but why no such names in Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire (which contains Verulanium), Middlesex, Staffordshire, Suffolk., Surrey or Wiltshire?

Home thoughts on Ireland

Before I begin these few notes, I am sure that they will read like an assortment of clichés as much that has been said about Ireland seems true. Much of the rain really is soft and gentle. The people are warm, helpful and friendly. They seemed to be genuinely pleased to see you.

There are down sides and to me one of the worse is the laxity of the planning system. Isolated bungalows are being erected almost anywhere and new ribbon development is being created. Much of the new building is either pretentiously mock-Georgian or very drab. This is not helped by the often gray colouring including the roofs although the latter is traditional. But would I welcome the almost garish use of colours on frontages in the main streets of little towns? The bungalow and plastic window is ubiquitous as elegantly pointed out by Pete McCarthy ( McCarthy ‘s Bar; A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (2000), 116 passim)

However there is much to rejoice about in the towns. So many of the shops are still family owned and often have old Victorian shop fronts and lettering. What a contrast in central Cork with the branches of Body Shop, Monsoon, Marks and Spencers etc. Advertisement hoardings often seem to be unchallenged and there is some very ugly development marring the waterside around Cork Harbour and more is planned. More of a dilemma must be how to meet the pressures for growth associated with the economic boom. Some settings of the ‘big houses’ has been intruded into by new houses and retail sheds. Aesthetically this is unacceptable but one can imagine a debate as to why the views of the Protestant remnants of the Ascendancy should have their views preserved at the cost of affordable housing for ‘real’ Irish people. The gentry’s case was not helped when one chatelaine explained that she had moved her baths so that they could get a better view and then moaned over the encroachment of new development into that view.

The gentry do seem to live in a world of their own keeping close links with each other. Most have very pronounced English accents although the Earl of Rosse affects an Irish one. After his family’s 800 years in the country, you might expect the Marquess of Waterford to sound Irish!!! They often seem to care more about horses and fishing than anything else and we certainly saw some beautiful horses. At the other end of the spectrum, tinkers still are in evidence and can, and do, take over towns from time to time causing great disruption.

I was impressed that the road signs are in kilometres and are often very c;lear. New motorways and road improvements are being added with the partial help of EU money. The number plates are very sensible beginning with a clear identification of the year in which the car was licensed; 05, 06 and 07 etc.

The food was excellent. Lovely butter and often great bread although I found some soda bread too dry for my taste. Raspberries were wonderful and the fish seemed magnificent (I did not eat any but those who did, raved about it). Cashel Blue cheeses tasted even better in its natural home. As someone pointed out, Ireland seems to be only place where you get potatoes with potatoes and this seemed to be true. Mash would be accompanied with boiled potatoes.

Railways were in evidence but not many trains. I wondered whether one could have a holiday by train. I remember reading of Stephen Dedalus’ journey to Cork from Dublin via Mallow. I would like to try it.

Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana ( picador edition, 1981)

On holiday I like to read something which contrasts to where I am. So I read of Indian’s in Canada in Brian Moore’s Black Robe when I was in Moscow and Joyce’s The Dubliners when I was in South Island, New Zealand. Thus I took this book to re-read when I went to what I expected to be a very wet Ireland. I remember feeling what a sad book this was as one could never recapture the world that Byron’s visited but, since then, the lands of Lebanon, Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan have been subjected to even more misery and destruction. Afghanistan has now had to endure the CIA-sponsored campaign against the Russian-backed government, the era of the Taliban and now the US led invasion. It is odd to read of the Great Game being played out in the 1930s and realise that Afghanistan still allows conflict by proxy to take place.

Byron sets out to journey from Palestine to the Oxus partly to explore the origins of Islamic architecture. For much of the way, he is accompanied by Christopher Sykes of the Yorkshire gentry family based at Sledmere. Byron’s reactions to Palestine where the Jewish immigration is in full spate and Arab resentments are brewing is so interesting with our hindsight. He obviously admires Jewish industry and achievements but not all their methods. He has fewer illusions over the Arabs than his compatriots in the British foreign service. His descriptions of the various Christian denominations fighting over the holy sites still seem to ring true.

On the Shah’s regime in Persia, his observations are now seen in their longer context. The dictatorial monarch was keen on westernisation but it resulted in fear so Byron has to give him the code name “Marjoribanks’ in his diaries to cover himself. In one place a Potemkin-style false town was erected to satisfy the visiting Shah that progress had been made. Since then one remembers the last Shah’s celebrations of the Imperial rule of Iran at Persepolis which it’s ostentatious extravagance.


In contrast, Byron liked Afghanistan. “Here at last is asia without an inferiority complex” . He believes that the Persians cut off their noses to spite their faces!! Herat would be better known than Samarkand if it had had fifty years of rail access. He describes the former’s wonderful monuments; do they still exist? An eye-opener is the importance of Gohar Shad Begum, the wife of Shah Rukh, and responsible for some of the architectural wonders. It is good to hear of a woman making a mark in such a male dominated society. Byron can see the good and bad in Christian missionaries. Some bring medicine to ravaged beings, others have “behinds stuck out as if their spines were too righteous to bend”. One humane Archdeacon only made one convert in thirty years and she asked for a mullah on her death bed.

There are triumphs of lyrical writing. A Governor and his son are lost in the sight and smell of spring. The green of Afghanistan is not like the harsh deep green of Bengal or the sad cool green of Ireland or the salad green of the Mediterranean or even the heavy, full blown green of the English summer beeches. “This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself”. Later he writes movingly of a landscape bleached of all colour by the heat and sun. And he revels all the way in flowers, irises, and the roses which stir Kabul dwellers ion the same way as blossom does the Japanese. We hear of a bunch of guards apparently running away from some wild beasts but actually rushing to gather armfuls of jonquils.

Above all Byron describes lands, cities and monuments of such beauty which we cannot see again from the pre-war Jerusalem to the cities of Persia and to the Buddhas of Bamian, deliberately blown up by the Taliban. He writes of Nejef in Iraq now the target of suicide bombers. He tells of the glass coffin suspended for a thousand years at Gumbad-i-Kabus and the greatest building in the world there. Is it still there? Until very recently the coins of Alexander the Great were still being used as every day currency until the men from the museums made the people aware of their value.

Sykes and Byron survive snakes, scorpions, malarial swamps, landslide after landslide, illness, the suspicion of being spies and the activities of unhelpful officials. But they also meet genuine kindness and wonderful drivers.

One slight criticism; the book has an introduction by Bruce Chatwin but it would have benefited from a proper editor and a wealth of foot notes explaining who persons were and what had changed since Byron's time but I suppose that if the 1981 edition had included this, it would now be out of date. And I also wondered how they really did manage for money.

In the end they never did reach the Oxus and towards the end of the book we find out why. The Afghans kept the Russians away from their southern areas to placate the British, and the British from the North so as not to upset the Russians. Byron reads home like Odysseus, the dogs welcome him and he dedicates his journal to his mother. Chatwin does not go too far in calling this book a masterpiece.

National Trust blog long version


Woke at around half past six and it seemed very dark. At 6.35 the clock radio switches Today on. James Naughtie and Carolyn Quinn are presenting it. Naughtie’s excessive enthusiasm for politics grates at time but his love for literature comes across later when he interviews Ian McEwen. Carolyn Quinn hardly ever puts a foot wrong; she is professional, bright, courteous and knowledgeable. Like the admirable Martha Kearney on Newsnight, she is also her own woman. What a contrast to Sarah Montagu who seems to me to be a political ladette, always trying to be one of the boys and far too strident when she interviews without listening to the answers to the questions.

Yvonne brings me tea and I get up as the News finishes. The sky is now a misty pink. Entering the study, I put on the computer and check my emails before looking at the papers on the Allday website. I check the Times, Independent, Telegraph and for light relief, the Sun. I also look at the local Argus site which is consistently poor. After a shave and a wash I change into my gym clothes and have breakfast. I always have grapefruit juice, with a cod liver oil capsule, followed by cereal. There is a four day rota; today it is Bran Flakes. I hate muesli day!!! Black filter coffee completes my meal. I keep listening to Today and hear Martin Nearey recalling David Blunkett’s hysterical call about putting down a riot at Lincoln Prison in which he suggested using the army and mentioned machine guns. Blunkett denies it but when I hear Nearey speak, I know who I believe. Later on Ann Atkins regales us with her thoughts. Why does the BBC now always give broadcasters two epithets. She is novelist and columnist. It does the same on Late Night Review; journalist and biographer; ballet dancer and critic. Not forgetting the well known playwright and know-all, Bonnie Greer.

After breakfast I walk about 15 minutes to the gymn. I try to go twice a week for a hour of total boredom each time. I have been doing it for nine years. When can I stop? On the way back I buy the Guardian and Argus. As soon as I get in I am in the shower with the radio on. David Blunkett is reading his diaries. They sound like a self-justifying whine. You can not escape him. He was serialised in the Guardian and had two programmes on Channel 4. Presumably there is a book too. Does he still have his grace and favour house? He must be making a lot of money. Whilst admiring his overcoming of his disability , he always seemed an uncouth bully to me.

I put on jeans, shirt and sweater and have jasmine tea, whilst I give the papers a first read. For once I agree with Polly Toynbee. She writes persuasively about the need to discourage the veil and a Muslim journalist writes of her experience wearing it. Then it is back to the computer where I draft an email for Yvonne to a friend who wants tips on New Zealand. Since our trip last year, some people think we are experts! I wax lyrical about the wonderful country . Then I reply to an email from an academic at Lancaster University who has given me information on a paper I am writing about an escaped black slave in the England of 1259. Only junk mail today. Just before we go out, John Small rings. He is Secretary of the Regency Society, of which I am chairman. We discuss the latest proposal for a high rise building at Medina House. So sad; the Council owned the site and could have stopped the demolition of the intriguing Dutch style building which housed Hove’s first Baths.

At mid-day, we walk to the Park and Ride stop at Withdean, discussing the economy of 18th century Ireland as a prelude to our Study Tour which starts on Thursday. I am wearing a Berghaus as rain is forecast. The bus is leaving but the regular driver stops for us. We get off at Churchill Square and try Debenhams for an autumn jacket for me. Last week we had an abortive search in Tunbridge Wells. We settle on one which is surprisingly cheap, £75. They were between £200 and £300 in Tunbridge Wells. It is brown corduroy and rather Alan Bennett or Sidmouth in style. We also bought some cosmetics for Louise, our daughter for Christmas. Then it was lunch at Pret à Manger. An Italian style sandwich and berry smoothie. We talked about whether Henry Moore’s tube drawings were iconic and which recent cartoonist had used the image.


After lunch we part, with Yvonne going to her Sussex University Art history class at the Jubilee Library. I go to Chelsea Building Society to pay in some money to our grandson, Lorcan’s trust account and walk to Waterstones. Why are the History and Literature sections always three storeys up? I buy Yvonne a book of the latest Heaney’s poems as a surprise gift for her birthday which is on Thursday. The day also marks the 790th anniversary of King John’s death. Having decided to buy a bottle of New Zealand wine for her birthday treat, I am persuaded to buy a Huntaway Sauvignon Blanc by the man in Oddbins. My final task is to get sterling from Barclays to pay for the taxi to Heathrow on Thursday. I plan to get a 5 bus home but the Park and Ride turns up quickly and I am home by 2.25. There is a much congestion outside the doctor’s I pass; it is flu jab day. When I set off it was cloudy but later on it turned sunny and warm and I felt stupid in my rainwear. However, when I got off the bus, it rained.


I re-read my paper which I will give to the Late Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in ten days. I feel that I will read it more smoothly if I know it well but it might also make me gabble. Then I try to find the web site for this blog. I have no luck but still spend an hour making a start. It is typed, as usual, with one finger.


With a cup of tea, I read more of The Guardian especially an article about The History Boys and the question of anachronism. This put Louise off the play but Bennett makes a good defence. However, I read his piece in Untold Stories on the same subject only yesterday. Did the writer of today’s article really interview Bennett? If so, he used the very same words. Perhaps it was an amalgam. I could not do all the simple crossword today!!! Yvonne came home at 4.45 and I had another cup of tea. Then I listened to PM which includes an item on the delay in holding inquests on soldiers slain in Iraq. It all seems so heartless. Then triggered off by The Guardian article, I read some more of Untold Stories especially the piece on film stars. I share so many of Bennett’s likes and dislikes.

For dinner we have beef stew with mashed potato and celery followed by Hagen Das vanilla ice cream and cherries. We drink water; wine is for weekends. We eat quickly as Tim Marlowe is doing a programme on Holbein on Channel 5 at 7.15. We have booked for the exhibition at Tate Britain on 3 November. I always enjoy Marlowe but I wish that he was on rather later in the evening. The programme is a delight confirming my love for Holbein’s work. One can imagine meeting his subjects in the street or on the tube. Later on we watch The Amazing Mrs Pritchard which is engaging but unrealistic and unfair to politicians. Jane Horrocks is never less than good. I eat an orange. Before going to bed, I watch the BBC News.

And so to bed.

This version was rejected as being too long!!!

The Lone Soldier

In her book “Elizabeth in Rugen” (1904), Elizabeth von Arnim, writes of finding a grave of a Finnish soldier who died in 1806 in a wood on the island of Rugen. She wonders who he was and why he was buried in an isolated spot way from other graves. “What had this man done or left undone that he should have been shut out from the company of those who are buried in churchyards”. (1) Six years after the soldier died, the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich painted “The Chasseur in the Forest” which shows a lone French cavalryman walked into, and dwarfed by, a dark, threatening forest . Simon Schama points out its significance to a German viewer; the raven in the foreground “is singing its song of death to the isolated French chasseur” and the “hapless chasseur” is being pulled into “nowhere good”.(2)

Could Friedrich have been inspired by the lonely grave? He was born at Griefswald opposite the island of Rugen and visited it on a number of occasions including in 1806. (3) It would be good to think that the soldier had not died totally in vain.


(1) Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth in Rugen (1904, Virago edition 1990 ), 177-9.
(2) Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995), plate 13 and p107.
(3) William Vaughan, Helmut Borsch-Supan and Hans Joachim Neidhart, Caspar David Friedrich 1774-1840: Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden (1972), 110.

Stolen literary documents 2

Visiting the fabulous Rex Whistler exhibition at Brighton Museum, I note that Whistler's beautiful sketchbook of his time in Rome during 1928 was lost (stolen) on an Italian train in 1929. Whistler was killed whilst serving with the Welsh Guards in Normandy in 1944. It is some comfort to know that the note book was returned to his brother, the glass engraver, Laurence, in 1959, thirty years after its disappearance. And now you can see it in Brighton.

Stolen literary documents 1


Reading the introduction to N Denhom-Young’s Richard of Cornwall (Oxford, 1947) I was reminded of my own paranoia at the possibility of losing my draft thesis to burglars. When I went away, I used to back up on two zip discs; hiding one in a suit pocket and giving the other to a neighbour. Denholm-Young writes that “all my notes towards this book and a draft of about a third of it were stolen from the Zurich-Chur express in the winter of 1938-9". So whilst the storm clouds closed over Central Europe, a robber bothered to steal these documents. Of course, Richard of Cornwall was also the only English King of Germany but did the robber really target these documents. It took poor old Denholm-Young the whole of the War to get his work rewritten and published. This triggered off another memory of a Central European stolen literary document; this time the crime took place on the shore of the Mondsee in Austria. Umberto Eco rested there after a journey down the Danube to the great abbey of Melk with his beloved. He recalls in The Name of the Rose that, after one tragic night, she left him taking his valued source book with her.

What does one do when an event like this happens? My first reaction would be to bury my head in my hands and burst into tears. In the end my thesis survived but I know, from the times when a long witness statement carefully dictated over many hours was wiped before typing, that I would pick my self up and start again. Or would I? Anyway I am glad that Denholm-Young and Eco both did.