The meaning of 15 Nottinghamshire place names and their quirky origins

Most Nottinghamshire towns can boast a history which stretches back hundreds, if not thousands, of years – leaving legacies on the landscape, built environment and local economies, and in the enduring names given to those places.

When it comes to British place names, Anglo-Saxon origins tend to dominate in the south and Scandinavian languages in the North, mixed in with Old British or Celtic terms for natural features such as hills and rivers. Nottinghamshire still shows the influence of all three factors in the names we find today.

Often towns and villages share common endings such as -tun (settlement), -ham (homestead), -feld (farmland), -by (village), -caester (Roman stronghold), -worthig (enclosure), -dun (hill), -halh (nook of land) – but these usually follow a first element which is much harder to define, especially when a personal name is concerned.

The famous Domesday Book – a land survey commissioned by William the Conqueror and completed in 1086 – shows Nottinghamshire names which have been modernised, but otherwise changed very little in all that time.

To understand where they came from, we went looking in the Oxford Dictionary of British Place Names.

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