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landmarks for journeys rather like traditional
aboriginal societies around the world including the
Australian Aborigines and their
dreamtime legends
which became fashionable in the West as
song lines
.
Trubshaw quotes the folk singer Chris Wood:
'People freaking out at this amazing Australian
Aboriginal thing where they don't have a map, they
just sing a song and then they know where they are.
Norfolk fishermen have been doing the same thing
for generations. There's a song that tells you all the
compass bearings and the landmarks that you would
need to navigate from Yarmouth to Newcastle.”
You can read Bob Trubshaw’s full essay online at
and you can also watch a preview of
a DVD he has made on YouTube if you enter his name
and
The Songlines of Avebury
into the search bar.
A Potted History of English Place Names
If we look back through our history to the earliest
times we see that place names can be broadly divided
into three categories.
Topographical
names
described the landscape features an individual would
see.
If the name is
habitative
this means that it
describes the settlement which might help a traveller if
it distinctive but if the name falls into the last type of
English place name –
folk
, meaning that it refers to a
people or a tribe then the chances are the traveller will
just have to stop and ask for directions.
has published a fascinating essay online in which he
shows how this might have worked in Anglo-Saxon
England. He describes example itineraries, for
example if you knew that you had to go over the
Green Hill (Grendon) to the Broad Ford (Bradford),
then temporarily join another path (Anstey) before
branching off to the settlement in the dead-end
valley (Compton) then the journey would be almost
as easy as following a printed map.
Twenty Words for Snow
Just as the Eskimos are said to have many words for
snow Mr. Trubshaw shows that our Anglo-Saxon
forebears had more than 20 different words for hill.
It would make finding your way by geographical
features much easier if you knew that hyrst is a
wooded hill whereas hoh is heel-shaped – imagine
a giant lying face down and picture the shape of his
heel and you get Plymouth Ho! The word
over
describes a long ridge that drops down to form the
shape of an upturned canoe like in the case of
Overton Hill to the south-east of Avebury.
There are also distinctive words for different kinds
of valleys and woodlands. So far so good but in the
modern age widespread literacy is still only about
six generations old so how can you remember a list
of place names if you can’t write them down?
Trubshaw suggests that folklore stories, rhymes and
songs might have been used to help memorise the