Very many names for places and features in the landscape were coined by travellers as aides-mémoires, descriptive mnemonics and mental maps like songlines;5 many others must have been brought into existence by people referring to neighbours who might have called themselves something else (something more flattering, for example, than the cold

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Place-name scholars have, perhaps understandably, taken it as axiomatic that Old English settlement and topographic names were introduced by Germanic settlers ‘exploring new lands’, as it were overpainting an existing topographical canvas of British, Latin, Pictish and Irish names. But no one can be sure if the majority of Old English names were

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