Sir,
It is good news that the purely academic word study of such names is to be co-ordinated with the growing mass of local observation of facts concerning the places.
There is one factor in their meaning so important that in my observation it is the determining influence in at least one-third the place-names. And yet it seems to have been unsuspected and unknown until a year ago. Students have usually looked to some characteristic of the place itself, or of its history, to explain its name. The factor I refer to is the prehistoric straight-sighted trackway on which the place itself stands. Either the type of sighting point which formerly occupied the site, or some characteristic of the entire trackway, or the class of trader coming with his wares along the track, or the type of wares which he brought, are, I find, embedded in hundreds of place-names.
The miller at Rhos-goch (red-marsh) from whom I inquired the name of a lofty hill in sight at the head of a valley told me it was the “Red Hill,” and added: “It always puzzles me why, because there never is anything red about the hill, at any time of the day or season of year.” I was able to tell him that in the “Kiln-ground Wood” at Whitney-on-Wye (a few miles away) we had discovered the scrap-heaps of an ancient pottery making red-ware, and that I found radiating from this spot straight lines passing through “red” place-names such (to name one track) as Redborough, The Red Lay (a cottage), and the Red House, and that this one line was confirmed as being a track by the fact that it lies for two miles on a road marked “Roman” on the map. I cannot take space to detail how “white” roads radiate from such points of salt production as Droitwich, in straight-sighted tracks through the “White House,” Whitwick, Wych Pass, Whitman’s Wood, Whiteway, etc., and the kindred proofs (not yet so fully worked out) attaching to black, brown, and gold place-names.
I write this in a farm-house, one of four houses which in about half a mile come exactly in a straight line, which continued passes precisely through churches and other sighting points. The houses are “Lower Raven,” “Upper Raven,” “Blue Bowl,” and “Upper Bowl.” The two “Bowl” sites are high knuckles on the track. I have found the same place-name element in another part of the county linking up into a straight line at Bowley Lane, Bowley, and Bowley Field. I can surmise what it means; it relates either to a sighting point on the track (there is a Bowls Barrow in Wiltshire), or to wares brought along the track. In the former case it would indicate a shape, as I find evidence that the place-name element “bell” does. Valuable as is Professor Skeat’s method of studying earlier forms of a word, it is only an adjunct in solving names going back to prehistoric times, not a basis.
If these two places were “bowl” places before the Romans came (as I feel sure they were), it is only an incident in their history to learn how the Anglo-Saxons rendered them.
Yours, etc.,
Hereford,Alfred Watkins.
September 23, 1922.
[As this letter raises some important points, the Director of the Survey of English Place-names, Professor A. Mawer, has kindly written the following note upon it:
It would be very difficult, without much more detailed evidence than is given in Mr. Watkins’ letter, to form any just or final conclusion upon his theories. They are based entirely upon the modern forms, and quite apart from any other difficulties which might be raised about Mr. Watkins’ views, it makes one rather uneasy that in the only one of his names for which I know of an ancient form, viz. Bowls Barrow in Wiltshire, the early evidence is in direct contradiction of them. The barrow is mentioned in a Saxon Charter (Birch no. 1215) preserved only in a fifteenth-century transcript (the identification is due to Dr. G. B. Grundy), and the form is bodelusburge. The first element is obscure, but it is clear that it has no connection with any word bowl or bole which Mr. Watkins postulates for the explanation of his series of names.]
Source info: MS note by AW “Discovery Nov 1922”.