The Auldest Tung

Talking Foreign Hills

It stands to reason that if any topographical analysis is valid and specifically for the villages, fields, waterways and hills of Britain the same is true across the North Sea. And it is there that we now turn. As in England in particular there are “-ings” throughout Denmark with concentrations notably in east, north-central and north-east and Jutland, whilst in the very north of Germany that was once Denmark in Schleswig-Holstein that concentration is initially precisely in the area of and, more precisely still, to the once sodden west of the Dannewerke. Then further to the south it is to the north of Hamburg and south-west through coastal North Saxony, inland into Saxony proper, all still in Germany, into The Netherlands almost to the Belgian border both along today’s coast and inland where the that coast probably was in 500 AD.

There are also “wolds” in three groupings. The first is just to the south of the Danneverke where on the Treene river there are a village specifically called Wohlde with water and then Stapel its southern boundary, the district of Berge, “bergh” or “barrow” by another name to the east and immediately further east still but very much in modern Germany the Daenischer Wohld, the Danish Wold. Moreover all lie in the Jutland Traps. Then the second grouping is in an arc almost from the North Sea to the north of Hamburg then turning back on itself to about forty miles south of Kiel, whilst the third, by far the largest both in number and extent, is from the German coast at Emden across the nearby border into The Netherlands, inland, at least today’s inland, to Groningen, the capital of Dutch Frisia, and fifty miles south-west almost to Zwolle.

This in contrast to “hills”, “Huegels”, which are few and far between, leaving “downs” or “duins”, which again are rare indeed and also scattered, and “lows”, “loes” and “laws”, with which matters become both intriguing and more complicated. Throughout Denmark today there are places, villages, towns and even small cities, the names of which end in “lev”, pronounced in Danish something between “leo” and “low”. It is said by Danes to mean “a remnant, something that remains” but is not a Danish place-name ending, which means it can only come from usage by people, who were there before the Danes arrived, Germanic people still but not Danish. Nor is the “from what they remain” clear, although curiously some English “lows”, such as Wilmslow in Cheshire, are academically interpreted as a synonym for “barrow”, not in this case a “beorg” in its normally accepted sense but a burial mound and specifically a “remnant” of someone’s life, to which I add one observation. I have personally visited and seen in Denmark perhaps a hundred “levs” and the one thing they seem to have in common is rising ground.

Then there is a second source of “low-like” names, those in Germany in Lower Saxony, and consisting of “loh”, “lohe”, the plural, “Lohn” or “lohne” or lah and “lau”, “lee” plus “loo” and “lo”, which are more numerous than “wolds” in the same area but equally scattered. And finally, starting again in Germany but on its north-western border with The Netherlands, there is the third and by far the largest grouping both in number and area. It stretches from the north side of the Ems, son in Germany, with there a slight “wold” overlap, one hundred and twenty-five miles further south-west to the Rhine and, although it then extends seventy miles inland back into Germany once more, because it lies mostly in Dutch territory consists mainly of “lo”s and “loo”s.

Yet there is a problem. Dutch etymology maintains that “lo” or “loo” has two possible meanings and they are contradictory. The first is a clearing in forest. German etymology records that same meaning for “loh” and “lohe” and the direct equivalent in English place-names is therefore “-ly”, “-ley” or “-leigh”. However, the second, is “a grove on high, sandy soil”, not a clearing but a stand of trees on the sort of higher ground that would have been ubiquitous in the Low Countries fifteen hundred years ago when it was wooded, with the operative words being “sand”, so coastal, and “higher”, so less likely to flood. I appreciate it is frankly flimsy at best but perhaps just as dunes, duinen, that on one side of the North Sea are there no more than a few feet high have seemed in time in Britain to have morphed into “downs”, in Sussex reaching not far short of 1000 ft, so the suggestion is that “lee”, “loo”, “lo” and “loh” over much the same period and circumstances equally went from a bit “high” to very high at Broad Law in The Scottish Borders at a fraction off 2,750 ft. Which then leaves, if the supposition is accepted that the why ultimately was because of climatic and population pressure, the questions when, how, where and by whom with the focus, admittedly from a Northumbrian starting-point naturally being Northumbria and a magnifying glass somewhat blurred by time, finally moved to where our interest really lies, north Brittia and Caledonia, to what we now know as Scotland?