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Place-names (toponyms), whether of towns, villages, individual farms and fields, or of physical features, such as rivers and hills, are imbued with meaning, even when the strict sense (the name’s etymology) might be lost or only partially understood. Names often have regional significance, and even a fictional name, using elements of historic place-names, can conjure a strong sense of place or landscape. As Allen Walker Reedi notes; “[o]ne of the devices used by regional writers is to incorporate into their work the place names that evoke the spirit of their region”.¹

Ordnance Survey Maps provide a wonderful resource with which to explore Kent’s place-names and their imaginative potential, or as a means to explore the literary landscapes created by novelists and poets. Trace, for example, the railway along the River Stour that has carved a gap through the chalk downs, and recall the announcement as your train pulls out of Ashford - “Calling at Wye, Chilham, Chartham, and Canterbury West” - rhyme and alliteration create a wonderful poesy of place. Or follow Chaucer’s pilgrims’ passage through Kent, ‘Rouchestre’, ‘Boghtoun under Blee’, ‘Bobbe-up-and-doun Under the Blee’ (Harbledown?), and so to ‘Caunterbury’.

The Kentish toponyms typical of the region, adopted or adapted by writers, originate from various phases of settlement, although most are of ‘Old English’ origin. Some pre-Roman names do exist, more often the names of natural features such as rivers. The Darent, for example, is thought to derive from the Welsh Derw, which the Romans latinized as ‘Derventio’ – “the river where oaks are common”. The county’s own name has an early origin (Roman ‘Cantium’), while a limited number of village and town names are Celtic, for example Penge (pen + ced, ‘wood’s end’), and Dover (from ‘Dubras’ ‘the waters’).

Whether authors adopt or adapt or simply invent regionally believable names, these add a layer of authenticity to their work. We can imagine so much more richly the journeys, the places inhabited or visited, when an immersive ‘deep geography’ has been created for us. Some authors retain real place-names although these may be ‘mis-placed’ in space – as in the complex geography of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s eponymous novel Joanna Godden. Set in the Kent-Sussex borderlands of the Romney Marshes, her place-names are locatable on a map, but often jumbled geographically, for example, the location of the farm inherited by Godden is describe thus:

Little Ansdore Farm was on Walland Marsh, three miles from Rye, and about midway between the villages of Brodnyx and Pedlinge. It was a sea farm.

The farm that identifies with Little Ansdore seems to be either Little or Old Cheyne Court, which do lie about three miles east of Rye, but Brodnyx is a tiny settlement near St Mary in the Marsh some way off, while Pedlinge sits above the marsh near Hythe. Other anomalies occur throughout the text, although the sense of the three Marshes (Romney, Walland, and Denge) is retained. The church that Godden attends is described as at Brodnyx, while its very distinctive feature, discussed in the text, a bell-tower separate from the main church building is in reality that at Brookland (which is more logically the church close to ‘Little Ansdore’. Incidentally, the name Godden has a Kentish connection, Godden Green, a hamlet a mile east of Sevenoaks.

The fictional ‘Chillingbourne’ immediately evokes a stream-side settlement for those who know Kent. ‘Chillingbourne’ was chosen by Pressburger and Powell as the name for the village in which the action of their film A Canterbury Tale (1944) takes place. The images of the village in their film is an amalgam of several other villages in East Kent, including Chilham, Fordwich and Wickhambreaux. Michael Powell grew up in East Kent and place-names ending in ‘bourne’ (Old English (OE) ‘burna’ = stream) would have been extremely familiar. He was born in Bekesbourne, one of several similarly named settlements (Bishopsbourne, Patrixbourne, Littlebourne) along a short stretch of the river Little Stour, itself known as the Nailbourne in its upper reaches. ‘Chillingbourne’ draws on the name element in Chilham, and so becomes ‘the stream of the family or followers of Cilla or Cille’ (OE).

Charles Dickens famously conjured with toponyms, some tending to the humorous – for example the wonderfully named ‘Dingley Dell’ in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. ‘Dingley Dell’ entered notaphilic history in the 1990s with the issue of the Bank of England’s £10 note that featured a portrait of Dickens with, as its background scene, ‘The cricket match Dingley Dell against All Muggleton’; Muggleton being Maidstone. The latter fictive toponym is celebrated in the naming of a J D Wetherspoon public house, the ‘Muggleton Inn’ in the county town’s High Street. Other places get relabelled, although not always in keeping with a Kentish vibe, as in the case of Rochester becoming a rather unimaginatively renamed ‘Cloisterham’ in the Mystery of Edwin Drood. See other essays on Dickens for further detailed treatment of other Kentish places.

Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and its sequel, Rewards and Fairies, are concerned with sense of place and belonging. Real places are named (Pevensey, Peasmarsh, Chanctonbury Ring, and Rye), while others are invented. Pook’s Hill (pucu (OE) = goblin, sprite) is probably Perch Hill to the south of ‘Batemans’, Kipling’s house. Kipling transforms his Sussex home and surroundings of into a theatre in which the children in the story, Dan and Una (based on John and Elsie, his children), learn about England, its history and the importance of people and place through encounters with figures from the past magicked up by Puck (‘the oldest Old Thing in England’). Set within the High Weald, the geological backbone running through Sussex and Kent, the narratives range widely from the Saxon manor in their own valley to Africa.

Only one narrative in Puck takes a detour to Kent, to a coastal town which Kipling significantly gives its full and very significant place-name, Dymchurch-under-the-Wall. The story (‘Dymchurch Flit’) describes how ‘The People of the Hills’ (faerie folk) mass at the coast to flee England distressed by the burning of heretics (in turn disturbing the locals). They are helped by two brothers who drown as a consequence but do relieve the tension felt by the human inhabitants of the Marshes - ‘fretty man an’ petty maid, ailin’ woman an’ wailin’ child’ from ‘Bulverhithe to Hithe’ (a large stretch of coast from near Hastings to Hythe in Kent). Dymchurch is a place of peril – a liminal site between sea and low-lying land reclaimed from the sea. It is perched perilously at the edge of the world behind its sea defences, at risk of ‘that the sea ‘ud rear up against Dymchurch Wall an’ they’d be drowned like Old Winchelsea’. The Marsh itself is characterised as a place apart:

‘Won’erful odd-gates place – Romney Marsh, ‘said Tom Shoesmith. ‘I’ve heard say the world’s divided like into Europe, Ashy, Afriky, Austarly, an’ Romney Marsh.’

‘The Marsh folk think so.’ Said Hobden. I had a hem o’ trouble to get my woman to leave it.’

Where did she come out of?’ I’ve forgot, Ralph.’

‘Dymchurch under the Wall,’ Hobden answered.

Both Kaye-Smith’s and Kipling’s works celebrate the landscapes (pays) of Marsh and Weald shared by of Kent and Sussex.² These are landscapes produced by centuries of human toil and land use reflected in their place-names, especially across the Weald where settlements ending in ‘hurst’ (OE hyrst = wooded hill) and ‘den’ (OE den = wood pasture) provide a running rhyme of toponyms across the map, and ancient woodlands reveal their links to the iron industry that goes back to Roman times; Forge Wood, Furnace Wood, Hammer Wood.

Banner image: ©Lisa Hawkins

Bibliography

Gelling, M. (1984) Place-Names in the Landscape. Phoenix Press: London.
Gelling, M. (1988) Signposts to the Past: Place-Names and the History of England (2nd Edition). Phillimore: Chichester.
Horsley, J. W. (1921) Place Names in Kent, South Eastern Gazette Newspaper Co.: Maidstone Canon J. W. Horsley; Late Vicar of Detling. Available via Project Gutenberg
Mills. A. D. (1998) The Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names OUP: Oxford.

References