Where Time Becomes Thin:
Locating Yourself in the History of Place - The breadcrumb trail of the place name
Naming Your Place
I grew up in a little pocket of 1970s semis in the middle of an ancient landscape. The road that I lived on was called Leighton Close. The close was a D shaped, on a hill; great for rollerskating at breakneck speed, great for home-made cart races. At the bottom end of the D you walked out straight into the rural; into fields and lanes named for their ancient echoes. Crab Lane, where 100 year old crab apple trees, once embedded in a long ago hedge, lined the mouth of the lane. A lane that led to a village called Seamer, named for its ancient roots, its position between the sea and a mere, a large lake. The names of place can be an archive of the lives of the people who lived on them, can link us to our own landscape-based identity, our roots.
When I was asked by my teacher at the time to find out where the name of the street we lived on came from, as a school project, I deep-dived into all the reasons my road was called Leighton. I came from a family with a farming background, people who had been naming their fields and streams and place for centuries. My family even had a road named after them in Thirsk because of their long association with the farms there. My research came up with this: Leighton, ton - a community, a village, a farm, and leigh a meadow, or a glade, which made sense, because we lived in a rural area. Leighton Close, a road built on the site of a farm meadow. How magical. Tracing the linage of the landscape under my very feet.
WRONG
Leighton Close was actually named after this man:
Frederick Leighton was a painter and sculptor and was born in our local town of Scarborough. He is one of the town’s notable characters. Somewhere in his own ancestry his people probably lived in a farm with a meadow or glade.
An early lesson in research - what you are hoping for can affect the interpretation of facts. Your life experiences, your internal or family narrative can affect how you view the past, and how you view your sense of belonging.
When I was writing The Ghost Lake I had a chance to talk to Nicky Milner, the archaeologist known for her work at Star Carr, and asked her how she balanced the science base of archaeology; the factual cold viewpoint, and the obviously necessary human, emotional lens through which we interpret archaeology. Because you have to have both, surely. If you are seeking to understand the actions of people who left long-blade flints at a horse hunting site in the Paleolithic, and you want to understand the dynamics of the group, then you have to look at yourselves, stripped clean of the now, undressed of clothing and convenience to see how we interact with our children, our friends. Humans are humans, there are behavioural threads there that are animal instinct. We, looking down the long inverted telescope of time, are guessing at the motives of people long dead, but we are guessing based on being human and looking at humans. I remember a phrase she used in response: There is a stopping place, before you get too far into speculation. A balancing act then. As writers must do.
I am brought back to this because my research for my new writing project is taking me into the 16th and 17th century and to primary texts, recipes, diary entries. There is flexibility of thought and emotion, because I am a writer and my job is to tell stories, but there is a stopping place. I cannot make a person who is known for one thing do something entirely different. But I can look at what isn’t being said, and interpret the untold story here. This is the same with place as it is with people.
When I was researching The Ghost Lake, many of the place names were wetland related - Carr, Ings, mere - because I was looking for the ghost of a long extinct lake. But some of the places threw up surprises. I’m fairly sure, for example, that Flixton is not, as I had originally thought named after either a farm belonging to Flix, or a settlement known for its fleece or its flax, but actually named for an 11th century hospital that was built in the village, a refuge for people fleeing the wolves of the Yorkshire Wolds, seeking a place to be protected. Fluhti - saxon for ‘to escape’ ‘fliehen’ meaning ‘to flee’ pronounced with a slight guttural inflection mid word. Fleexton. Flixton. Language is malleable. It changes on the tongues of those who know it, those who are new to it. It changes with changes to the landscape, use of the language. It is like a river being re-rooted by fallen rocks, trees, man. But it is also a breadcrumb trail to the past, to the people who came before us, the way they expressed their place in the landscape.
More and more I think that it is important to find roots, to buckle in and brace against the storm that is raging over the world. More and more I find that people want to do that with their landscape, with the places they feel pulled to. They want to honour the nature of the place, they reach for some simpler time that didn’t exist. I am doing it now. I am making elderflower wine from the trees in my own garden, and thinking about the common folk who foraged the hedgerows, the working class people whose voices are lost in the written history of place. I have no idea the religion of these people, or anything about them, only that their hands reached for the white flowers of the elder, as mine do. This is the lineage of place.
Right now, people want to turn away from the men who would bring this world to the edge of annihilation because of a belief that they, and only they, belong to one place. Belonging is not a single moment, it is the knowledge that you are a part of a longer story, and that story is not singular. Time is immense and the history of people in relation to place is one of change, constant, constant change.
Taking up space in the history of your landscape
How might you ground yourself, literally and figuratively in the landscape? How might you honour the landscape and the nature in it as part of your story?
You are a part of the story of your landscape. Not just an observer, you are relevant, your personal narrative is stitched into the fabric of the landscape around you: the work you do, the life you live, the way you interact with the world. Your story is the story of your landscape too. Go outside and interact. Stand in your place, imagine the people who came before you. What do you know about them from what is left in the landscape. Where is the breadcrumb trail of place names that leads you back in time to the thin place, where you could reach through, push yourself against the membrane and touch the face of the people who lived here too. Note it, notice it, be aware of your own part in the story of place.
Until next time
x
Ah, this is great, thank you. I'm particularly glad to read it after writing about the importance of place and history myself last week. And isn't it fun making up place names in fiction? I've really enjoyed creating a fictional landscape for my current WIP, out next year, including river names and village names based on where there might have been a ford etc. Making it all make sense in terms of toponymy!
As a ground engineering specialist, one of the best bits of the job was the desk study: we competed among ourselves to find the critical historical map or landscape feature which would unlock our understanding of what was going on under the surface and hence inform what we did next. Other forms of engineering rely on specifying what you want the steel fabricator to make but ground engineering is a matter of working out what’s already there, and what challenges it might throw up for whatever you want to create there (a building, a road, a water main). And a big part of interpretation was about spotting the place names and following them through. Spring Lane, Waters Green and anything ending in Moss, Ings or Carr would definitely require further investigation!